Neighborhood Health Tontines
We propose the formation of Neighborhood Health Tontines as the U.S. transitions into a post-oil world. Without cheap oil, we will have to meet more of our needs locally.
In a Neighborhood Health Tontine, neighbors help each other keep healthy. We come to each other’s aid when illness strikes. Each time we assist another neighbor in the Tontine, we might earn points that we could then use in exchange for help when we ourselves need it.
These are a few of the possible ways we could help each other in times of illness:
- Bring groceries or cook a meal
- Care for a child while the parent recuperates
- Drive a Tontine member to the doctor or hospital
- Shovel a path through the snow from the house to the woodshed
- Offer a session in nutritional education or in a healing skill we have such as Reiki, Quantum Touch, Chi Lel, Shiatsu, massage.
- Give a free workshop to other Tontine members on nutrition or exercise (yoga or Stability Ball, for example) or on one of our healing skills. (We have an art and movement studio at Geryunant. As much as possible, we can make it available for Health Tontine workshops.)
If we taught each other such healing skills as Quantum Touch, then, when one of us falls seriously ill, we could all come together to offer powerful healing.
Sustainability is a process whereby people become increasingly less dependent and more self-reliant in meeting their basic needs. Neighborhood Health Tontines meet the sustainability criteria.
Our medical system is structured so that “consumers” go to “providers.” (Absurdly, even women giving birth, engaged in one of the most powerful acts on earth, are portrayed in this model as “consumers.”) In the Neighborhood Health Tontine, the model shifts to one in which capable neighbors give and receive healing help.
Of course we will still go to the medical system whenever drugs or surgery are called for. When we need them, drugs, surgical equipment and the skilled physicians who wield them can improve and even save our lives. We have every reason to appreciate that.
But there is much we can do for ourselves before seeking the extreme measures pharmaceutical and medical technology corporations would have us reach for first.
Health Tontines in one’s very neighborhood are about the “re-localization” of life we need in a post-oil world. Neighbors help neighbors in a Tontine just as in the old days neighbors came together to raise a barn. They worked, ate, and then danced together and in the process, helped each other survive.
Neighborhood Health Tontines would be a powerful means of community-building. Over the years, as we heal and are healed by our neighbors in times of pain, fright, loneliness and distress, we would be building strong bonds among ourselves. It then would be natural to cooperate in all the other ways we would need to in order to thrive in a post-oil world with heart.
We envision Geryunant’s African Chi Dance classes as seeds planted for Neighborhood Health Tontines. Each class ends with brief instruction on a healing practice we can use for ourselves and our neighbors.
We have taken the word “Tontine” from a practice developed by Senegalese women in West Africa. Barred from obtaining loans within the banking system, the women form groups of friends and neighbors. Each member of the Tontine pays a small amount of money into a common pot each month. Each Tontine member, in her turn, receives the whole pot of money. With that windfall, she might start a small business or build a house.
Outside the established structures of their society, these women have found a way to thrive.
As well we may.
