Four figures lay in the shadows as I cracked the door to the basket weavers house in the backyard open. A petite young mother, her younger sister, and two baby girls lay in the darkness. She had been beaten and had fled to the artisan center to hide where she had made a bed for the babies on the concrete and then called me to tell me where she was. I quickly came down to the artisan center and found them all there, lying on nothing but a spread out sheet that they had brought with them from their home- babies sound asleep. The young mother’s shoulder was swollen up where she had been beaten with a stick. Apparently her “marie”, her boyfriend/husband, has another lady who is also pregnant. This will be his sixth child with three different woman and he is only 24 years old.
The thing is, he is not a bad guy. He is a guy who is struggling to make ends meet, fighting over where to spend the money, and unfortunately not fighting some of the cultural norms for men here. It is not uncommon to have several women, it is not uncommon to have many kids with several “wives”, and it is not uncommon to have domestic violence be the norm.
I can’t say how many times women have come running to the artisan house with their heads bleeding, or lumps on their backs because they hadn’t come home promptly from a shopping trip, or had found their man with someone else.
It is something I just don’t really know how to deal with. How do you change a culture? How do you teach someone something at 30 that we would have learned at age 4.. don’t bite, don’t hit girls, don’t steal, don’t lie….and how do I stand here knowing that I would probably full well do the same thing if I had the same enormous pressures on me for survival? How do I not judge, but also not be ok with it? How do I make this better?
These are the things that I think about in the pauses between the amazing things that we get to experience here. It is just one of the many hard things that I was never exposed to in the states to this degree. It makes me sit in silence and think. And everyonce in a while I pick up the computer and want to share these moments with you….
The thing is, he is not a bad guy. He is a guy who is struggling to make ends meet, fighting over where to spend the money, and unfortunately not fighting some of the cultural norms for men here. It is not uncommon to have several women, it is not uncommon to have many kids with several “wives”, and it is not uncommon to have domestic violence be the norm.
I can’t say how many times women have come running to the artisan house with their heads bleeding, or lumps on their backs because they hadn’t come home promptly from a shopping trip, or had found their man with someone else.
It is something I just don’t really know how to deal with. How do you change a culture? How do you teach someone something at 30 that we would have learned at age 4.. don’t bite, don’t hit girls, don’t steal, don’t lie….and how do I stand here knowing that I would probably full well do the same thing if I had the same enormous pressures on me for survival? How do I not judge, but also not be ok with it? How do I make this better?
These are the things that I think about in the pauses between the amazing things that we get to experience here. It is just one of the many hard things that I was never exposed to in the states to this degree. It makes me sit in silence and think. And everyonce in a while I pick up the computer and want to share these moments with you….
