Chapter 10

The barn raising event represents an opportunity for the author to really get to know the Minimite men, mingle and bond with them. It is interesting to see all the different personality types and temperaments that not even the author expected. Also quite common is the fact that the majority of men seem to be transplants, not born Minimites but coming from other areas with various degrees of technology use. Despite their differing backgrounds and characters, they all come together in working side by side as they all decided to give up some labor saving technologies by coming here. In a society where technology is limited, relationships become very important as people need and depend on each other’s help to meet their needs. The very belief of self-surrender may have caused the sense of self and fostered its existence by the acceptance of each other; it seems as though they are accepting even the less conventional types as the bishop’s son for example.
For the first time in the book the author uses graphical illustrations of posts and boards that are put together to create the house extension. This kind of helps explain the process but can’t help but wonder why the author chose to exemplify this situation and not some of the other contraptions described so far.