In Uganda, kids are raised a little differently. They are shouldered with much more responsibility much earlier in life and given very little in the form of nurturing and comfort. This leads to kids that are more autonomous and arguably stronger than our spoiled, over-stimulated, over-sensitized children.
The kids that live next door to me are ages 14, 11, 10, 7 and 5. They live with their parents. The home they are living in now is not their ancestral home. It is simply the home they live in because their father works at the school. Their mother lives back at their ancestral home where she manages the farm and other income generating projects. So the father lives with the five kids in this secondary home. For about the past 10 consecutive weeks, the father leaves Thursday evening for his ancestral home to do some sort of work and returns back to the school on Tuesday evening.
There are few things I take note of when this occurs. First, the father just blatently abandons his job for three out of five days of the workweek. This is pretty common at my school. Probably because my head teacher doesn't enforce almost any of the arsenal of policies he has at his disposal. The second thing that I note, is that the kids are left alone for a good 4.5 days each week. What do they do when their father is gone? Everything!
They dig in the garden. They harvest their own food. They collect their own water. They cook their own food. They cook amazing meals for me. I'm so thankful I have them. They bathe themselves everyday. They manage their own bedtimes. A few weeks ago I asked the kids if they wanted to watch a movie that night. The response from the eldest siblings literally was, "These are school days. We cannot." Meaning he refused because he knew they needed their sleep for the school the next day. I was shocked. What kind of kid in America would respond in such a manner?
They manage others bedtimes! When a neighbor boy who stays with the family showed up late one night, they refused to let him in for over two hours. The boy sat outside crying. I asked the kids why they didn't let him in for so long, they said because he was late and they had already locked the door. The boy cried a lot, but I bet he learned his lesson.
The work out their conflicts on their own. With no parents to comfort and console them, the affected siblings sit and cry, sometimes for over an hour at a time. They cry until they get tired of crying.
Even when the father is there, they work it out themselves. Last night at dinner, the seven year old daughter burned her wrist on the wood fire they use for cooking. She started crying. The father came out and asked what was wrong. The kids told them what had happened. He stood there for about five seconds, and then walked back inside the house. The daughter continued to cry for about another 20 minutes and then she was silent.
Kids are treated differently. I mentioned last night at dinner. I was having dinner with kids outside. The father never eats with his own children. He eats inside, by himself. This is pretty customary in Uganda. Many times in a household, the children and wife eat at the floor while the husband sits alone at the table. In more progressive families, the wife will eat with the husband at the table. Even in my home stay back in training, all the children at on the floor, the table was reserved for me and the mother (the father was deceased). I'm sure if he were alive he'd have been at the table, and possibly not the wife. Kids are served the least amount of food. The man of the house gets the most. As a kid, the bigger you are the more food you get. The smallest gets almost nothing.
Kids are runners. Meaning they run errands. For who? Well, for anyone who is not a kid. I take advantage of this situation daily. I have my kids go and get me things in the village or go buy food for dinner. It makes me feel lazy, but I have to admit, I like the practice. And my kids are happy to do it. For them most of the time it means they will get some sort of reward from me out of it.
Given the situation that they have been given, the kids are incredibly humble and well behaved. I continue to be impressed by their humility, respect, and discipline. And find myself paralleling what a similar situation in America would yield.
One of the reasons I believe the kids are so disciplined, is because their very survival depends on it. As a poor, rural Ugandan, there are certain things you have to do everyday. Otherwise, you don't eat, or you don't sleep, or you get sick, or you run out of money, etc. There is no social safety net. No one and no thing to fall back on. It is one man for himself, or in this case, five kids.
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