Reflection by Edgar Cahn
The story captures one timebanking exchange in the life of Artika Tyner, a lawyer committed to bridging our racial divide. For her, timebanking was not simply a transaction. So we commemorate that plumbing exchange because it birthed a relationship. And that friendship expressed Artika’s driving force to create community in order to advance justice. Her life’s goal: To be a Super Hero for Justice.
So I called the Super Hero. Where did I find her? Faraway in Kotoka International Airport, the airport in Accra, capital of Ghana. She was returning from her seventh trip, teaching social entrepreneurship to students there, helping them become dreamers, creating new possibilities, using technology, documenting intolerable disparities, and pursuing a course of study that would enable them to use their skills to make a difference.
Artika had written a storybook for children called: Justice Makes a Difference: The Story of Miss Freedom Fighter Esquire. So I asked her, what would she be doing on coming home?
She would follow the pathway she laid out for Miss Freedom Fighter in the book: (1) Return to her university to create new warriors for justice, (2) mobilize students, clients and community as warriors and builders, (3) get in the trenches herself.
A transaction becomes a relationship. A relationship becomes a story. A story becomes a vision of the possible and life becomes a journey dedicated to making that vision into reality.
Maybe that’s the real lesson of timebanking. A single act can be the catalyst that exposes new opportunities and expands possibility by injecting purpose.
Miss Freedom Fighter stays on script, her script, our script.
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