품앗이, pumasi. You go and work on somebody else's job, and later they come and work on yours. 품 is a pair of hands, the labour itself; pumasi is hands lent and hands returned.
Transplanting the rice, making the winter kimchi — for anything too big for one household the village came together this way. Today everybody is in your paddy. Tomorrow everybody is in mine. There was no ledger and nothing was signed, and the labour came back all the same.
We live now in a time when you are expected to manage everything by yourself, and asking has got heavy, like taking on a debt.
Pumasi assumed the opposite. Owing each other, and paying it back, was the thing that made you neighbours.
Nobody thanked anybody at the end of the day. They just settled what time to start tomorrow.