When The Village Shared One Wheelbarrow

In this current ‘me world’, it might shock the youth that there was a time, not too long ago, when the entire village was such a close-knit community that everything was shared.
When I was growing up, there were only two wheelbarrows in my village. What would happen is that anyone constructing a pit latrine would borrow it.
Often, it wasn’t just the wheelbarrow that was borrowed. Spades were borrowed. Drums for storing water were constructed, ditto tape measures, ropes and so forth. You even borrowed labour to fetch water for the construction! Thus, all the permanent buildings in my village, at least the early ones, were all constructed using borrowed equipment.
It is not like the donors were altogether happy about their wheelbarrows and spades moving from one home to the other to the extent that they never really owned them. But to deny a kinsman or a neighbour something you were not using was extremely crass. It would put you in bad books, which wasn’t a very nice thing when everyone needed a large crowd of wailers at their funeral.
The beauty about this is that it allowed folk to focus their meager resources on the project, and not waste money on little things that could be borrowed. Of course, it helped that wheelbarrows of that era were designed to build a whole village, unlike the plastic things manufactured these days, which give up the ghost even before the initial project is half way.
Bullocks
This borrowing thing went beyond wheelbarrows. For as long as I can remember, the village only had two or so bicycles and an equal number of transistor radios and record players. So when you had a distant funeral to attend or pesky in-laws to appease, you borrowed a bike. When you held a dance, you borrowed the record player. And when you learnt that a distant relative had passed on, you gathered at the only home with a radio to hopefully get to hear your name broadcast live on radio as one of the departed man’s cousins.
We borrowed combs, mirrors, iron boxes and even razor blades, when baby came ‘suddenly’ and the umbilical cord needed cutting. We borrowed bullocks and ox-drawn plows, jembe and, axes. Man, we even borrowed clothing when a serious journey arose, but alas, our own threadbare shirts and dresses were not considered up to the task.
When our wives couldn’t get children, our relatives lent us some. When we couldn’t sire children, we borrowed a relative’s seed. I mean you could make ugali and dash to the neighbour’s house and borrow cooked vegetables, or a dollop of cooking fat.
Well, these days, that rubbish is history. In the village, there are certain homes that ‘you don’t just enter’ ovyo ovyo.
And if you dare walk in through the gate, the woman of the house looks at you with the cold eyes of a dead  fish, such that by time you say, “Please helep (help)  me with your wolparry (wheelbarrow),”  you  can see her squirming husband lying, “it’s not there” even before he opens his mouth.
Result? Everyone owns an idle wheelbarrow.