Many communities have traditions of working together for the community. People will come together to help someone build a house or a barn or harvest crops, will trade child care among each other, or will collectively organize holiday events. All healthy communities will have practices like this, but often it becomes hard to sustain them when times are very difficult, particularly for a long period of time. At the same time, the contemporary economic system makes it hard to sustain these practices, by encouraging all of us to act as individuals, not together.
This article, by Aisha Mansour of Dalia Association (introduced in the ABCD object) discusses the Palestinian tradition of Al-Ouna as the opposite of the aid agenda in Palestine today.
This video was made by an organization called Naseej which supports youth community development in the Arab world. In it, a group of young people from Palestine participate in a project which they named Al-Ouna. Listen to how the young people describe working together on the project.