You could almost say that the definition of community is a place where there's gift giving.

The converse of that would be that if you want to destroy community, a good way of doing it is to turn all gift giving into commercial exchanges.

We want to find out what it is like for us, an urban American family – accustomed to 24-hour supermarkets, multiplex theaters, top quality medical care, freeways, high-rises, thousands of restaurants in a 20-mile radius, and a daily barrage of media – to slow down. So we moved to the South Pacific. Our first stop is Rarotonga, a tiny island in the South Pacific.

It's a big change for us. We'll be staying on a land mass that’s 99.9993 percent smaller than the United States. It means living among wild dogs, pigs and roosters (which run freely on the island), instead of screaming car alarms, smog-belching Hummers, and random incidents of road rage. It means spending long, sultry afternoons wandering through the rainforest as an after-school activity, rather than sitting in traffic on the 30-minute drive home from school, only to rush through computer games and indoor 'playdates' with other friends. It means picking mangos and breadfruit, buying taro root and coconuts from the front porches of people’s houses, and fishing for supper, rather than zapping a frozen gardenburger in the microwave the moment hunger strikes. It means experiencing life’s moments, rather than breathlessly trying to keep up with our schedules.