I have a similar experience from my childhood. I grew up under communism in eastern europe and I remember the crisis we were going through at the time, food was rationed and there were long queues everywhere. People were even joining queues without knowing what was being sold and some would start lining up overnight. I was a kid back then and didn't experience the adversity first hand but I could see and sense what was going on. Aside from these things, however, I remember how helpful and inclusive the community was. People were sharing whatever they had, whatever they cooked, recipes, anti-establishment jokes, books, video tapes, etc. There was this sense of belonging that now has dissipated completely. I was struck with a deja vu when I visited Cuba a couple of years ago. People are poor but are sane and happy in their own ways and they have time for one another. There are still disparities but not like in a western society when one counts their pennies and the other their billions. Romania, the country I grew up in, has been engulfed in corruption and asides from a cities with large concentration of wealth, everything is in disrepair, the community disappeared almost completely and everything seems to have gone downhill for the past 30 years. In no way am I decrying the communism, it was brutal to many, but what has ensued after the fact was a veneer of shiny nothing.