To be
honest, this home and living here 24/7 has tested my patience more than any
other place I’ve lived in my life. I now have a very visceral understanding as
to why social workers and caretakers at group homes in the US work in shifts. I
am also getting a crash course in how parenting can be maddening, because there
are no shifts. Unless you’re blessed with a great support network, there’s no
one to work nights for you while you rest, nowhere to send all of your children
while you take a retreat, and no higher authority to revert to when you’ve
exhausted your parenting tactics.
Many of the
boys at this home display a wide array of attention-seeking behaviors, due to
their complicated pasts and low self-esteem. I have to remind myself daily to continue
to love them, and to remember that their behaviors are a product of the social
exclusion they endured for so many years on the streets (and still face in many
ways). I remind myself not to shout, and to make patient requests rather than
demands. I read Marshall Rosenberg’s “Non-violent Communication: A Language of
Life” (Read it anyone and everyone who hasn’t, it is amazing!) yet I fail each
and every day to implement the empathetic, non-judgmental listening techniques
that I aspire to possess.
Often times
it requires paying acute attention to the boys’ behaviors to unmask what is
provoking them. For instance, we have started making paper beaded jewelry with
all of the boys this holiday season in order to sell it in the US and fundraise
for the home. The woman who cooks for us at our home has two small
granddaughters, and last week they were “helping” to make beads with us in the
sitting room. They were sitting on the table attempting to make beads as the
rest of us worked. One of the boys (who is about 14 years old) came into the
room and proceeded to put one of our dogs on the table, spilling all of the
beads, scattering the papers, and getting the table dirty with whatever the dog
had last walked through. Every time I took the dog off of the table, he would
put her back on. We ended up ceasing our bead-making activities for the day,
and it wasn’t until later that he came to me and told me that he was annoyed
that the baby girls were sitting on the table that we eat on, so he had put the
dog on the table out of anger. I will never understand the logic behind this approach,
but had I understood his behavior as it unraveled I could have spared us a
shouting match and we could have continued making jewelry.
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| Joseph and his trusty dog Max |
One of the
most painful aspects of this work is to witness the way in which power
relationships and cycles of abuse play out in their lives. Having been the
objects of scorn for so many years, many of the boys have internalized the
resulting rage and now take it out on the boys who are younger than them, on
our cook’s grandchildren here at home, or on the dogs (their former competition
for left-overs when they lived on the street). They’ve been taught for so many
years (first in their homes and then on the street), that the stronger person
wins—the one who exhibits the most power prevails. Though they were once the objects of severe
beatings (at home and then by the local police on the streets), they remain
convinced (as do 99 percent of Ugandans in an informal poll taken in my brain)
that beating children is the only way to educate them.
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| Our cook's grandchildren helping me wash my clothes. (Sadly they are no exception to the rule as far as harsh disciplinary practices are concerned...) |
As much as
I try not to be ethnocentric so as to respect cultural norms and beliefs, I
will never believe in beating children. While it can certainly change
behaviors, it doesn’t change attitudes. While children may stop stealing
after being beaten, they change their behavior because they are scared of being
caned, not (as Marshal Rosenberg states in his book) “because they recognize
the responsibility for their actions and are conscious of the fact that their
wellbeing and that of others is one and the same.”
I simply
don’t believe that we were placed on this earth only to fear and invoke fear.
Many of the boys have gone back to their respective villages over their school
vacation and those that still have fathers have described a similar pattern.
When they were growing up, they lived in fear of their fathers’ wrath and
constant beatings, and in most cases this influenced their decision to run to
the streets of Kampala. Now that they have grown up physically, however, and
they know how to fight, their fathers are now scared of them. They can now go
home only because their fathers are scared of their sons beating them and can
no longer lay a hand on them.
As I think
about this phenomenon, I can’t help but imagine the sadness of a loving God
watching Her creation turn life into a cassette tape whose music evokes fear
and pain, until it is flipped over at a given point and then remains silent,
fearing the wrath of its listeners who have had enough if its music. I can only
hope that wherever we are on this earth, we seek out those whose ears are
ringing with the caustic tune of fear, pain, and uncomfortable silence and do
our unique part to turn this into a melody of unconditional love and mutual
understanding.
