Shades of grey (written June 28)

Last night I witnessed an interesting event while I was hanging out before bed that I thought was blog-worthy, so I wrote it up. Here's some background. There is a young (mid 20s) woman in our village (let's call her Sue) who has an ~18 month old child. She moved here a few years ago when she married her husband. When she came, she brought one of her younger sisters (let's call her Betty) along to help her run her new compound. Sue and Betty generally relatively equally share the burdens of running their portion of the compound (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc) and caring for Sue's child. Most of the time, this set-up works fine, but occasionally Betty loses patience with having to do all this work and runs off to play with her friends like the elementary-school kid she is. Naturally, this is when problems arise.

Last night, Sue decided she wanted to hang out with her friends instead of watching her child, so she assigned Betty to babysit. Betty was in the middle of playing a game with her friends when she received this unwelcome news, so she refused. This situation quickly escalated into Sue hitting Betty with a large stick and ranting about it not being fair that she had to watch her child by herself all the time. At this point, something cool happened. As I've mentioned previously, corporal punishment is very common here and generally witnesses stand by and let it happen without batting an eye. This time, however, something about the situation triggered the other women in the compound to run over to stop the beating. One of them even jumped on Sue's back and took the stick away from her. Once they had successfully stopped the beating, the women turned on Sue and gave her a serious tongue lashing, among other things, accusing her of being a bad mother for always trying to push her child-watching duties off on Betty.

This intervention in defense of a pre-teen girl (the generally accepted work-horses of any compound) really surprised me. My initial reaction was that the trigger must have been that Sue was so hugely and obviously in the wrong. But, after further thought, I started to wonder...how wrong was she? Well, of course, corporal punishment is not a strategy I support. And after all, she made a choice when she decided to have a child and now she has to live with that responsibility. But wait...I don't know for sure, but chances are very good that she had little or no choice in the matter when she was married off, sent to a new village, and subsequently, in part because of limited to no access to birth control, became pregnant (this is after she spent years watching all her younger brothers and sisters enjoy the privilege of attending school, while, as the oldest daughter, she had to stay at home and help her mother run their compound). Having a child is just as life-changing here as it is at home, and given the low use of family planning here and the minimal role women play in decision-making, chances are she had very little choice in when to have a child. After considering all this, while I still disapprove of Sue beating her sister, I have trouble blaming her for being bitter about the responsibility of her child. However, I have one more wrench to throw into this scenario. Most women here do want to have many children. At least once a week I have a conversation with some “Gambian women about how many children Jacob and I want to have (2 or 3), in which they are absolutely horrified and insist that having many children is “very good” and we should have at least 5 or 6. So, why do the women want so many children? My understanding is that it is to: 1) make their husbands happy by boosting their social status; 2) reduce their own daily workloads by adding extra pairs of hands to share the work; and 3) provide security that they will be cared for when they grow old.

Sorry the paragraph above is so stream-of-consciousness, but I haven't fully formed where I stand on all this yet. Lots of food for thought. So many shades of grey and so many layers of "root causes" and challenges. Living here truly makes me reassess my perceptions of "right" and "wrong" on a daily basis...