Solidarity in full swing in Ait Wartiran in face of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Not isolated from most of the world countries, Algeria is suffering from the spread of COVID-19 virus which has resulted in hundreds confirmed COVID-19 positive cases, increasing number of deaths and thousands under quarantine.

Affected by the complicated politico-socio-economic challenges the country is witnessing since many years, the Ministry of health as many other official institutions in Algeria has a limited budget and ressources and could not cope with this pandemic considering the current resources.

The hospitals and the health system all along Algeria have a poor infrastructure and lack of equipment. As a matter of fact, In Ait Ourtilane’s health system as in so many other places, were already under severe pressure due to a lack of medical supplies and the pandemic has only made the situation worse.

In this regard, an urgent campaign has been launched in a close collaboration between several associations and non-profit organizations and other actors of the local community whether in Ait Ourtilane or within the diaspora in Europe and America, to collect the necessary funds to support these efforts and help to save lives of thousands of people.

This appeal to the generosity of the people of Ait Ourtilane wherever they are based, has resulted an exceptionally large mobilization and non-expected response from all the actors of the local community and the diaspora.

This campaign was launched initially to acquire an Oxygen Evaporator Central as soon as possible to respond the urgent need of the hospital of Arrassa in Ait Ourtilane, while the initial target was 60,000.00 euros (Price of the Oxygen Evaporator Central in Algeria), the intensive efforts and the large call of solidarity has pushed this campaign to reach unprecedented digits in the history of the region.

This historical caritative initiative of the brave children of Ith Warthiran aware of the alarming situation of the patients of all the villages of the communes of the Daïra of Ith Warthiran after the closure of the COVID-19 service at the hospital of Aarrassa following the shortage of oxygen cylinders.

These brave people mobilized the whole community of Ith Warthiran nationally and internationally through several actions appealing for donations using all the online and offline tools possible.

In result of these enormous efforts from all parties and thanks to the generosity and involvement of the population, in less than 15 days, an amount of more than two billion six hundred million centimes (26,000,000 DA) was collected including almost 100,000 euros donations from only the diaspora in France. (Digits are not final as the campaign is not yet officially terminated and not all donations has been counted).

-According to the Coordination of local associations in Ait Wartilan-

In the flagrant absence of the State in the region, marginalized for a long time and which lives on the solidarity of its people, this sum will allow the acquisition of an oxygen evaporator central, a scanner and many other medical devices allowing to provide good health care services not only to the inhabitants of Ait Wartiran but to all the neighboring region.

This amazing example of community initiatives and many more concrete cases of practices of social solidarity activities in Kabyle in these challenging socio-economic contexts show that interesting things are currently being done there in practice, even if the task is difficult.

The ideal is transformed into the achievable by the interference of two nourishing elements.

First, the fundamentally united traditions of Kabyle, which provide civil society actors with organizational forms, values and standards that make it possible to easily raise awareness and build projects calmly.

In critical situations, citizens cast a jealous glance at the ancestors who, faced with the severity of adversity and the attacks of adversaries, were able to build by themselves mechanisms of solidarity that allowed the local culture to cross unscathed and for society to maintain harmony through egalitarian fraternity and solidarist union.

The scrutinized past sends them back a proven institutional heritage which, being collectively internalized by the past, asks only to be invoked and then summoned to resurface.

Then modernity which, by means of globalization, which has instructed the local contexts of the failure of the state and its local institutions in dealing with the problems of unemployment, social decohesion and loss of meaning and the need to lean on local heritage to better exist in a world made up of territories in dynamic inter-influence.

In short, all the importance of such an amazing example of community initiatives lies above all in the fact that they achieve a "junction between these young (current generations) who are in doing so with the oldest discourses which have a historical consciousness".

They legitimize it and at the same time they give it more precision: these ancient discourses are, for the Kabyle society, its heritage of ancestral knowledge, partly embedded in the traditional ways of being and of doing, among oneself and with others.

In fact, this initiative is not something new in the region, In the history of Kabyle, belonging to the community is a strong element of individual and collective identity.

Village communities in Kabylie have acquired since ancient times a strong capital in local development practices thanks to endogenous type initiatives, carried out under the aegis of Thajmaεth (village assembly), which ensures the coordination and proper execution of any community project.

This alternative model that goes in line with the principle of active local subsidiarity involving all the cells making up the village community in Kabyle in a very dynamic way around social, economic, environmental, legal, and cultural issues.

By the exemplarity shown by this initiative, wonderfully done by the community of Ait Ourtilane, and beyond its practical utility, this well-concretized project gives all the citizens of Ait Ourtilane, in the "bled" as well as abroad, the pride of having succeed to massively contribute to their community-development without the involvement of the State and local authorities and gives hope in the face of the new constraints born of globalization and the resignation of the regulatory State.

The people of the villages of Kabyle must always continue to trust, adhere to, and become actively involved in projects carried by structures that have adopted standards and coordination procedures historically built at the local level. Collective actions, which makes it possible to jointly control hazards, jointly constructing a possible ideal.

This new logic of action for social transformation is driven by active solidarity for the development of a territory of common life. This territory is to be perceived as being a harmonious whole animated by a breath which came to it from its distant past.

A breath given by a specific culture, a culture of union and fraternity, which evolves in an environment which shapes it, and which tries to preserve it and adapt it to new challenges and mutations.