How We Gather

The people yearn for community, but how does it actualize?

A month in Portland, the rest of the summer at home in Sioux Falls, photographing how people end up in the same room. People say they want community. This is what I saw.

I stayed with the Nguyens the whole month. Lan is a friend; his parents came from Vietnam and he was born here. When I arrived I was using their house as a place to stay. They were not the project. Then I was sleeping there and waking up there, and eventually that was the project too.

Sundays went to church, restaurant, market. I have no photographs of the market because I didn't have my camera. I wasn't planning on working. I was just there with them.

Everybody loud, everybody moving fast, all of it in Vietnamese. Mr. Nguyen down the aisles with purpose. Mrs. Nguyen helping him and stopping to talk to every auntie who passed — hello, hello, how have you been. Kids hanging off the carts. People standing still in the middle of it while the store moved around them. Nobody scheduled any of it. They all just knew to come at that hour.

I said something to Lan about it. He said: this is my Sunday, every Sunday. This is how it always is.

A family friend from the refugee camp drove me around Portland and introduced me to nearly every Ethiopian I met there.

One of them owns Addis, an auto shop. He is the mechanic and the owner and a leader at his church. His wife runs the register. His son works there — architecture degree, no jobs in the industry, back at the shop.

Most of their customers are white and fairly well off. Almost none Ethiopian.

The one I keep coming back to was a man in a MAGA hat who came in talking, unprompted, about conspiracies. He was clearly not doing well. At the end he struggled to pay, and there was an issue about it, which got resolved. Two political worlds breathing next to each other over an oil change.

What I expected to find in Portland and didn't is a connected Ethiopian community. There are pillars — the church, most dominantly — and not much else. I asked a market owner where he sees other Ethiopians. He said: I go to work, I go home, I go to church, and that's about it. I pushed and he had to actually think. Then he said the only time he sees anyone of his diaspora is when they come into his store.

Church is central in a way that's hard to overstate, and it works the same in both cities. Sunday, five in the morning until noon. Upstairs is the service, a men's side and a women's side with an empty aisle between. Downstairs is the food and the kids. While the service is happening the women are in the kitchen making what everyone will eat afterward. A priest told me he sees people coming just for the end of church. Those moments are the loudest of the whole service.

Ethiopians here are more connected than I expected. The clearest case is a soccer program the community runs for the kids — free, in one of the parks, every Tuesday and Thursday through the summer. So many kids they've had to add rules.

One rule is that parents can't drop their kids off and leave. A supervising adult has to stay the whole time. So now there are kids running their hearts out on the grass and a line of grown men and women along the edge with nothing to do but talk to each other. Politics back home, mostly. Sometimes sports.

One day 605 Indivisible did a bridge brigade — hand-painted signs hung over an interstate overpass. The wind kept taking them, so people had to stand holding them for an hour or two. Which meant people in one place with nothing else to do, which meant they talked.

At the labour union's Second Sunday brunch, loads of people from varying occupations crossed paths. I went back for the weekly organizing meeting. Attendance was sparse.

The city puts on outdoor concerts — the Levitt series, bands downtown on Thursday afternoons. A thousand people, maybe. Lawn chairs in rows across the field, everybody facing the same direction. It skews older. It's pleasant. There isn't much talking and there isn't much movement, and still the Levitt is flooded with lawn chairs.

Every one of these places brought people together. Not all of them connected people.

The difference isn't size, and it isn't who runs it.

The variable is how much of the work is left to the person. At a concert you'd have to turn to a stranger and start, and almost nobody will. In the market aisle nobody decides to connect — the aisle does it. Church, food, the errand you were running anyway, a shift you share: those absorb the cost for you.

Two of the best things I found were accidents. A rule about child supervision produced an adult social hour twice a week. Wind on a bridge produced a two-hour conversation. Nobody designed either one. What they have in common is that people couldn't leave yet.

And the cost never actually disappears. Somebody pays it. A retired man with time. An uncle trading days around a shift. Women in a church basement, cooking through the service they're missing, making the meal that turns a congregation into a community.

People already want this. What they don't always have is somebody carrying it for them.

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