Set Free International

What Is Community

Set Free International is a growing community of women from around the world; women who share extraordinary skills, talents, hopes and stories.  It is a community that is young, just learning how to walk. And, a community that we believe will grow.  The Set Free community is about:

• Hospitality, not purchasing power
• Coming along side, not power over
• Not helping, but learning
• Not saving, but growing together
• We all have to learn and grow
• We all have to give and to receive

It is a community involving you. We invite you to join in our endeavors by sharing your stories and thoughts on community.  What does "being in community" mean to you?   Is it your family, neighborhood, church friends?  How far does your concept of community extend?   Does it extend to people you may never meet who live in a country across the globe from you?  At Set Free International we believe community involves many hands from many places, all of whom come together to give and receive  the abundance of the human heart.   We would love to hear your thoughts.    (Click here to email your thoughts)

Many Hands of Community

Philip Gourevitch, a journalist reporting on the genocide in Rwanda described a beautiful definition of community in his book, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families.”

“On one side of the road, the mountain formed a wall, and on the other side, it plunged into an apparently vertical banana plantation.  The rain dwindled to a beady mist, and I stood outside listening to the arrhythmic plink and plonk of water globules bouncing among the banana leaves. 
An hour passed.  Then a woman down in the valley began to scream.  It was a wild and terrible sound.  Silence followed for as long as it takes to fill the lungs with air, and the undulating alarm rang out again, higher now and faster, more frantic.  This time, before the woman’s breath broke, other voices joined in.  The whooping radiated out through the nether darkness.
The continuous whooping knotted around a focal point, reached a peak of volume, and began to subside into shouting, in which the voice of the original woman stood out with magnificent, adamant fury.  Soon the valley fell quiet, except for the old plink and plonk among the banana leaves.
A Rwandan in my convoy made inquiries and announced, ‘This fellow was wanting to rape the woman who cried.’  He explained that the whooping we’d heard was a conventional distress signal and that it carried an obligation.  ‘You hear it, you do it too.  And you come running,’ he said.  ‘No choice.  You must.  If you ignored this crying, you would have questions to answer.  This is how Rwandans live in the hills.  The people are living separately together,’ he said.  ‘So there is a responsibility.  I cry, you cry.  You cry, I cry.  We all come running, and the one that stays home, must explain.  This is simple.  This is normal. 
This is community.’”