This is a fictional story based on actual events:

Person A is walking to his garden and sees that a lot of nuts have fallen from a nut tree in the heavy winds last night. The tree is not in his village or on land that belongs to him in any way, it is nearest the house of Person B. The nuts are Person A's favorite nut, so he gathers every last one from the ground (a lot) and begins to carry them back to his house. Person A quickly realizes the nuts are too heavy to carry back. It starts raining. Person A stops at person C's bush kitchen to de-shell the nuts, as the nuts have big shells and would be a lot lighter if he wasn't carrying all of the shells too. While Person A is de-shelling the nuts, Person C comes into her bush kitchen with her two children, persons D and E. Persons C, D and E help person A de-shell all the nuts he has gathered. Person A thanks persons C, D and E by giving them a good bit of the nuts. Person C has already prepped the evening's meal, so she and her children eat just a few and give the rest of the nuts to her mother, person F. The next morning person F cooks the nuts and leaves them in her bush kitchen. While walking to his garden, Person G stops by to visit person F. Person G receives a basket's worth of cooked nuts. Person G walks on and a few minutes later stops to talk with some kids that are just hanging out. Person G gives some nuts to each of the four young men that are just hanging out, person B is one of the four.

Including the immediate family of Person A, Person C and Person F, at least 16 folks ate these nuts. Though I'm confident person G wasn't the only person to stop and visit with person F that morning. And person A gave Alex and I some nuts after they cooked them for dinner that night. I suspect the actual number of people who ate from the single nut collection was more like 25.

There is no word in the local language for 'economy'. There is a word for sharing.

People here sometimes talk about a "kastom economy", what they are referring to is using local products in lieu of money for business transactions. For example, in our community you can pay school fees or health dispensary costs with chickens or pigs or woven mats or money. I believe we learned about this "kastom economy" system in grade school. Our teachers called it bartering. Bartering was described as a primitive economy with money the obvious and natural evolution, as bartering only works when both parties have something the other party desires. Next came the evolution from money to make bartering simpler to bankruptcies, housing crisis and global markets; but who knew?

Bartering occurs here but it's rare and pretty scripted, it mostly only happens at the school and health dispensary. What is a lot more common is scenarios of sharing as I attempted to describe in the nut example. When you are constantly being given things (mostly food) by you neighbors, friends and family, you not only have more than enough to eat but you also feel obligated to give surplus to your neighbors, friends and family. As long as everyone in a community is sharing their surplus (and going out of their way just a little bit to have surplus to share), then everyone in the community is always going to have enough.

Sharing gets too complicated with specialized workers - like teachers and nurses. The specialist can't spend a lot of time in their gardens and thus would be almost completely dependent on people giving them food. To combat this potential issue (who would be comfortable never knowing where your next meal is coming from? or possibly more importantly who would want to teach little hooligans all day everyday if the reward was no different than spending a few hours (at most) in the garden every morning?) teachers and nurses are paid, thus creating the need for a "kastom economy".