Healthy Work Consciousness

Habari Gani?! Ujima! Habarigani

What’s the news? Collective Work and Responsibility! That’s the news!

It’s the third day of Kwanzaa and the gift of this day in the holiday season is allowing a closer look at the way we work together. Holistic health is inclusive of effort expended to get what we want in terms of material life comforts and money consciousness.

This is especially true since so much physical and emotional stress is the result of negative attitudes around working together towards a goal.

As a dollar store owner I called myself exercising ujima by working with AA men from Atlanta who, it turned out, were thieves. That is another story!

At least I ran into a female vendor in New Jersey, a wholesaler of dry goods –paper plates, towels, tissue and the like. I decided to support Freedom Paper and, since I closed the store in 2014 and my parents passed away (consuming my energies), I neglected to keep up my relationship with Freedom Paper.

I could have continued to order, using my experiences to build reinforce ujima and establish a buying cooperative among friends and family. This week I’ve done some outreach so we can collectively buy our paper goods and work together to distribute them to families and neighbors.

Tomorrow I intend to discuss cooperative economics –ujamaa– as the next step. I’ll strive to answer some of the questions you may have regarding how to work together to achieve material success.

–Rev. Niamo Nancy Muid