Can hard times bring communities together? Sherry Wachter of Milton-Freewater, Oregon, contacted HuffPost to bear witness to how she and her neighbors are helping each other more and more as the money gets tighter.
Wachter and her 6,000 neighbors are part of a small agricultural community that's taken a big hit from the economic downturn. But over the past year, she wrote, she's noticed people finding alternate ways to afford the things they want, and in the process reigniting their sense of community. People are trading one good or service for another: some bricks for a fence, some flower bulbs for seeds, this shirt for that jacket. Wachter herself has been letting an old friend who's down on his luck sleep on her couch for the past three years in exchange for remodeling the house and doing yard work. It's win-win, she said.
"I dont think anybody would think of it as 'bartering'," she said in a phone interview. "It kind of is a community thing... Out of all this awfulness we might actually be able to capture a part of our national identity that's worth recapturing. That whole idea that we have to watch out for each other. None of us can make it just on our own."
"This recession has changed me," she added, "and it's changed the people in my town. It's made us turn every nickel twice. It's made us re-think how we spend our leisure time. For some of us it's stripped us of the safety nets many have taken for granted -- savings accounts, health insurance, retirement accounts. And that's not good. But what I'm seeing is that in my town, at least, we are starting to come out of our houses, and look around, and build new safety nets not of money, but of relationships. And I think that's very good indeed."
HuffPost readers: Seen bartering in your home town? Has the bad economy made people in your town closer? Tell us about it! Email jmhattem@gmail.com.