On Corporal Punishment (written Feb 3)

Jacob already touched on this briefly, but I wanted to talk a little more about the prevalence of physical violence here. It really is exceedingly common, and it is something that we are really struggling to come to terms with. As Jacob mentioned, beating (or threats of beating) is the accepted way to discipline a child of any age for any transgression, no matter how minor. While we don't agree with this strategy, we do recognize that the kids here can get out of control very quickly and it does seem that physical violence is the only way to get their attention (nevermind the vicious cycle that produces this mentality - we are not condoning the behavior we just realize that given the current situation it is the only method parents have for discipline). Situations where the severity of the beating far outweighs the severity of the transgression are particularly excrutiating to watch. Here are two examples, interestingly both relating to pounding rice/millet, a very physically demanding job:

1) We just witnessed a twenty-something women demand that a 7 or 8 year old help her pound cous, then take away the pounding stick and push the child away when she wasn't pounding well enough (due to lack of physical strength at that age), which made the child cry and eventually lie down on the ground to nurse her injured pride. A few minutes later, while the child was still lying quietly on the ground, the woman asked a different child to get her a stick, and she proceeded to hit the first child at least a dozen times on the back of her legs (which were bare). The child started wailing, but she kept hitting her, while two other young women looked on and laughed. It took all the strength I had to keep myself from snatching the stick away from her. Instead, I just turned around and walked quickly out of the compound back to our house.

2) A few days ago, we were helping our 11 year-old host sister pound rice when she started sweating profusely and was gagging and having trouble breathing. She had been telling us earlier about how hard she had been working all day in the sun, so we suspected heat stroke or something along those lines. We quickly made her sit down and gave her some water to drink. We told her she needed to rest and we would finish her pounding for her. In between gasps for air, she kept standing up and trying to keep pounding, saying that she would be beaten if she didn't keep pounding. We told her we would not allow that and went to go talk to her older sister, who is a mother figure for her. We explained the situation as best as we could in Mandinka and told her that her sister was not well. Her reaction was to laugh and say her sister was very lazy and just didn't want to work. As this was happening, an English speaker walked up and we asked him to translate and explain that she should take the situation seriously. He also laughed and agreed that our host sister was lazy. We had to leave to go to meeting then, unfortunately. I guarantee our host sister went back to pounding to avoid a beating. Thankfully, she seemed ok the next day, so I guess no harm was done that time. A couple days later, the same girl came home from school and showed us where her teacher had beaten her (we never were able to determine why).