In addition to these descriptive characteristics that were proposed by, to community organizers Warren and Warren, there are

other prospectives on characterizing communities. There are, according to other authors, offensive and defensive communities. An offensive community is highly active. People are concerned about problems, not only in the neighborhood, but broader issues, environmental concerns that affect their neighborhood and maybe the whole town or district. They are highly visible through cultural festivals, activities. They get media attention. They're well known. They can easily come together to take collective action. They have leadership structures and, and organizational structures to get things done. Within such communities there's often an active middle class that has the time and resources to make the contacts, pull people together, hold the meetings had the linkage with outside resources such as the media to get attention, such as the town hall to get resources. In contrast, is a defensive community.It's concerned primarily with the issues that happen in the neighborhood, more reactive than proactive, may respond to crime in the neighborhood, may respond to, teenage pregnancy in the neighborhood, may respond to bad roads in the neighborhood, and activity occurs through local group who don't have much contact with outside communities, like this may be waiting for outside intervention. It may be a conscientious working class or lower middle class neighborhood. Strong group norms, strong sense of social control, this sounds very much like the parochial community. Another variation would be the hidden, community. These may be, for example, as I mentioned, something, some of the, peri-urban, slums, around large cities in Africa and Latin America. Poverty is a pervasive problem. This overshadows all other, concerns. There may be few group activities. People don't have the time because they're poor, they're eking out a living.

Even the children are busy working. We talked about the household being a productive unit in the former module. People may have individual personal contact with other members, but noted that there are unlikely to be community-wide festivals. Community leadership may be diffuse or nonexistent. People may not even live on the, may not even own the land they live on. These would be, hard to reach communities. We talked about this in relation to our diffusion theory. These would be communities that would be less likely to adopt new health behaviors and new ideas because it's difficult for information to penetrate this community. It's difficult for people to get the resources they need to adopt new health behaviors. Agencies attempted to reach communities like this, primarily on an individual, case by case basis, trying to solve an individual problem as opposed to look at the structural. Problems of the economically underprivileged that live there. Again, whatever kind of community it is, it's important to recognize as a unit of identity the community, itself, must define itself. The community must be involved in its own diagnosis and mapping. We need to learn from the community where the borders are, who are members, where the location is. Is it compact and dense like in a city, is it spread widely over the mountains as in Uganda? Communities definitely do not correspond to lines on the map. We can look at, the situation of Ibadan, where the government has set up different wards and different local governments, such as boroughs in New York, but within that you have a wide variety of people. You have a peri-urban area that is newly settled with middle class people and you have an indigenous community that traces its ancestry back two hundred years. All of these are thrown together on the official map as being one borough, one local government. And yet, the people themselves are quite distinct. Lines, clearly, as the case as shown in Africa, divide people.

You have people of the same ethnic group on, in two different countries. Colonial power divided the country without considering the sense of identity. And today, people don't think anything of crossing the border back and forth because they have relatives on both sides. So it's very important from the standpoint of community development and health to find out from the people themselves, because again, if decisions are going to be made, if these programs are going to fit into the group norms, if communication is going to work through existing social networks, we must identify these from the contexts and the perspective of the people themselves. An example of community identity is found with the Masai, who are cattle rearing nomadic people in Kenya and Tanzania in East Africa. Their local norms define how they use the land, how they interact with each other. And again, we need to study and learn from the community how they perceive of their own situation before we develop programs. I see that all natural resources and living things have names, special uses, special roles in culture and ceremony. Everything is valued. This is very important when one considers location of services or putting in roads or things. Because these may go against local beliefs and people would not accept such services. There are spiritual perspectives in defining community. The role of a mother Earth in, as an ancestor, tying people together. Various myths and legends need to be learned to see how people define themselves. Why they come to occupy this land? What are their, norms? Expected behavior, we need to look at, the, concerns, of, land use. Sacred places exists. They're not appropriate for locating services, health centers, wells, whatever. We have to know these things, get people involved in planning, identifying. Describing their own community so that if services are provided, they do fit in,

because once the land has been desecrated, people may not again, pay attention to the interventions of, of health agencies. What kind of communal roles and expectations are there? We see a slide with people helping each other construct houses, building roofs. There are these roles and expectations that identify a particular community. And people who are members know what these expectations are. Other examples from the Masai. The community may be mobile. They may avoid settling in certain marshy areas. They may believe that pastoralism is part of the normal way of life. And yet they still have a defined community, but that community may not be physically in the same place from month to month or year to year. Even though the community is physically moving, they still have a strong respect for, land, preserving it, and the idea on that sense of land ownership, is an alien concept, all of these are examples, of how, people's, sense of identity and definition of the, place where they live, or places where they live are important in terms of. Their own perception of what their needs are in terms of health and social services. What kind of services would be acceptable? What role they play in, in providing and meeting their own needs. So that, for example, the indigenous plants and medicines. beliefs about what kind of activities on the land may cause disasters or not.