Call: Habari Gani?! (What's going on?)
Response: Ujima! [oo-jee-muh]
See my previous article about Kwanzaa for an explanation of the call and response.
Today is the third day of the Kwanzaa celebration, and it is focused on collective work and responsibility.
In our kinaras, we light the middle, black candle, the red candle that sits next to the black candle on the left and the green candle that sits next to the black candle on the right.
According to the Nguzo Saba, as written by Maulana Karenga, collective work and responsibility means:
to build and maintain our community together and make our brother's and sister's problems our problems and to solve them together
Since the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa should be implemented all year long, let’s talk about how to make that happen.
One way we can teach our children to implement collective work and responsibility is to have them help out the elders in our communities. This can be accomplished all year 'round by cutting grass, raking leaves, taking trash out to the curb for pickup, going to the neighborhood store for small items, shoveling snow off sidewalks and other things of this nature.
Another way we can teach our children to implement collective work and responsibility is to talk with them and find out if they have classmates who don't bring lunch to school and/or who don't have money for lunch at school. We can pack an extra sandwich in our children's lunches and/or give them extra money and instruct them to buy lunch for a friend.
As adults we can implement collective work and responsibility in similar ways, picking up and doing the tasks for our elders that are out of the scope of tasks that should be done by our children. We can prepare and deliver meals to our elders, drive our elders to places they need to go, get medicine prescriptions filled for them, sit with and read to them when they're not feeling well enough to leave their beds, invite our elders to our homes for family dinners, especially when we know that they live alone and don't get out much.
It is our collective responsibility to take care of one another, and we can accomplish this by bridging the gap between our children and our elders with ourselves in the middle to encompass the entire community.
Happy Kwanzaa!
