Who am I?

(Probably not one for the kiddos.)
I didn’t want to get out of bed today.
Today, I hate this place.
There are moments when I could imagine staying here until I’m 80. But there are days, you see, when I convince myself I could leave here after two years and never look back. Today is one of those days, only worse. Rebelling parts of my mind and heart are trying to convince the whole of each that I could be OK in leaving today.
The people and the culture can get to you.
Last night I came up the mountain in the dark, after I rode a piece with Annika. I heard screaming and yelling ahead and soon met up with our friend Davitica, who was closely trailing our other friends—or maybe I should best say our neighbors—David and his wife.
David had a small, prickly tree branch—big enough to carry some umph, thin enough to have good bend to suit wonderfully for whipping—and was tearing at his wife with it as she alternated between stumbling up the trail, flopping defiantly on the ground and running off into the woods or down the trail.
Davitica informed me that the woman was drunk and insisted on sleeping on the trail or down in the valley. She whispered that it was bad, bad—this beating. And the balu—that was bad, bad, too… though I know her to drink just as heavily as anyone else here in the Hills.
David would whip his wife. She would in turn try to run away or bowl him over. He’d shove her back down to the ground, hard, sometimes smashing her into a rock or giving her a swift blow to the head with the end of the stick or his arm. She’d howl and moan. He’d grasp at her clothes, pulling her—anything to get her up the mountain. Sometimes her dress would come clean off and he’d beat her bare skin with that ugly branch. Davitica told me he would kill her.
I was shaking, at the same time furious and terrified. I demanded to know what he was doing, what she’d done, that he stop. He paid no heed to me, never so much as acknowledging that I was there. I yelled and yelled and then fell into a kind of bewildered shock as Davitica would at the same time tell me to leave it, leave it then echo my words. The wife used me—“Ibeja is watching! Ibeja is watching”—to no avail. Davitica pulled me here and there—there was no passing the spectacle, as the paths are skinny—and commanded me not to cry, not to cry as she took her hands and hurriedly wiped my eyes, just in case I dare shed a tear. She’d point my flashflight here and there, trying to give the battling couple enough light to see the path. I guess she thought the sooner they got home, the sooner it was over.
Eventually I couldn’t stand it—unable to coax him into stopping with words or throw myself between them—and tore up the rest of the path, still shaking and angry. I collapsed on my bedroom floor and cried, wanting to vomit, until poor Kimmie heard and came into to comfort me. Then we just listened on the path, praying and waiting until we heard them coming—still fighting—along the path and to their compound.
There is beating all around us in Lopit—of the children, of the women, sometimes even of the men by the women—but never have I been so helpless in the face of it or so right in the face of it. I had to follow that brawl for nearly twenty minutes, able neither to stop it or look away from it or close my ears to the yelling and the moaning. Who am I to yell and demand a man—of so much more worth in this culture than a woman—stop beating his wife, his property? It’s his right, his duty to keep his wives in line. Who am I to enforce my Western, Christian ways on a couple who knows only this way? Who am I? Apparently no one, not even an audible voice against the culture and the cruelty.
Don’t worry, I did get out of bed and faced this culture again. Little Francis (now known to us as Grasshopper) met me at our gate as we left and gave me his teethy smile. And even as I imagined him beating his wife in the future—for being drunk, for not fetching enough water, for not having dinner ready—I hoped that he would be different, that he would be a Christian…