in their court...

Lately, things have been hard.

 

I’ve often been tempted into frustration and anger because of the way we’re treated here. It’s hard, to live every day and be treated as less than human being, treated as some kind of joke. Here, I’m not seen as a mature adult who can contribute anything to the community. Children tease and hit me. They constantly are at my windows, looking in, watching everything I do. They yell; they cheat; they steal. Imagine, Cath had all her underwear and bras stolen off her line. (There’s no Wal-Mart here at which to quickly and cheaply replace that stuff, mind you.) Children can have their way with us. We have very little control, because we refuse to wield a stick, which is all the Lopit children really understand. And we get very little to no help from our neighbor ladies, who normally only laugh at our impassioned pleas for help, when we’re standing in our doorway, trying to get the 20+ children crowded around the door and windows to leave, so we can just have a moment’s peace.

 

So sometimes, especially if I let myself think on it too much, it can become this overwhelming THING that’s always before me, that makes these already hard living conditions much, much harder.

 

That’s been a really big struggle for me lately.

(Hold on, this ends well. It’s just… long.)

 

So you can imagine the other night, sometime past 10 (which is really late here—“missionary midnight,” some say), when a handful of children were running around our compound, looking in the windows at Kim (already sleeping), trying to open the door, stealing things through the holes in the kitchen window screens and being generally disobedient.

 

Honestly, I was ready to tear apart those small children and their parents with the most vicious Lopit rhetoric I could muster. Trying to control that kind of layer upon layer of frustration and felt injustice can get hard.

 

Somehow, I managed to catch one. And let me tell you, the girl went absolutely nuts, flopping around and yelling and trying to flee. I’d seen her shoes and picked them up, so she was trying to wrestle them away. (We’ve since learned that such “evidence”—the shoes—is really valuable in Lopit “court cases.”)

 

Anyway, I yelled for the monyemiji, because that’s who is supposed to deal with this sort of things. Some came, and we explained what was happening. They wanted to make her sleep in our house over night—apparently, that’s how it’s done! I remember, when Cath and Jen had their house broken into while we were gone, they hogtied the kid and put him in a house until they could convene the “court” and bring his punishment. We convinced them that’d be no good and instead kept the shoes as collateral.

 

Yesterday afternoon, we marched up to the mangot (monyemiji meeting place) with those shoes and beat the mangot, which is what you do when you have a case. And so a bunch of monyemiji came, and I was floored by how they handled it.

 

They brought the four kids and had them sit in the middle of the place, being sure that they faced us. Then one main guy took our story, then proceeded to calmly ask the children about it. Three of them knelt down, at their level, and asked them simple questions  about what had happened. I’ve never seen anything like this before here. Normally it’s all yelling and beating and acting in anger. But this was grown men, putting themselves down at the kids’ level, speaking in normal tones. They were ready to cane them, but accepted our request that they not be beaten, but that they would carry water for us instead.  

 

I felt this huge burden lifted. We thanked them and asked them to please help us, that we need help, because the children are so bad to us, they don’t respect us because of our white skin, but they are the warriors, so they are respected. They applauded our bringing the problem to them in the Lopit way, and said that this is how it must be done—we all raise the children together, so they grown up obedient.

 

I honestly left just amazed. I never thought they’d actually help.

 

So, a long story. And one that probably doesn’t make much sense. But it was a release for me, and made life seem not  quite so overwhelming, like I can finish these last months stronger because of it.