It takes a village?

Seen through new eyes of someone expecting a child of my own, it is fascinating to observe parents in my study villages. Right now the young woman who does the cooking in the house full of teachers where we are staying is here playing cards at 1:30 am. I haven’t seen her 2-year-old baby in hours. The baby doesn't have a father around that anyone knows of, so the baby isn't with him. The few times I have seen him today he has been covered in dirt, not wearing any pants, and he has received nothing but scoldings and spankings from his mother (granted, one of these times was for peeing and then subsequently pooping while eating on the floor of the house here, so it came a little closer to justified). Most of the day he is running around the village by himself or with other young children while his mother works. Sometimes he is in the arms of a neighbor or his grandmother. She works 10-12 hours a day to be a good cook, and I realize there is a trade-off between time spent working and time spent with children, and survival (in this case, employment) always wins out over the desire to be a better parent. The concept of parenting in the sense I am accustomed to doesn't really apply here. People are hoping their kids just survive. The woman who cooks here is fairly representative of young mothers in these villages.


Yusufu, the cook's 2-year-old son


Rukia with her baby and 2 village children

In the interviews we do, women are constantly mentioning how the reason they want babies is to play with them and hold them, but are also quite blunt (and unanimous) that children’s real value is that they grow up and do things for you. By helping with the arduous physical work of living, children make life easier. But the lack of a concept of parenting—a particular issue with boys here, who are not generally considered to be of future benefit in cooking, cleaning, etc. and so are left to play, unlike their sisters, who are raised helping their mothers with daily chores—could in part explain why development is so slow here.

Children, especially boys, raise themselves here, usually in groups of other children. Irene mentioned that yesterday she did an interview next to a house where the mother had gone out to the farm in the morning and had left her children at home. Not wanting to neglect them, she left a pot of ugali (thick corn grits) for her children’s lunch. When they got hungry, the children went to get the pot, carried it outside, ate their fill, and carried the pot back inside. These “children,” Irene reported, were really infants, just 11 months old and barely able to walk!

Many children are not in school because few families have the money for school fees, and some don’t see the point when a child must pass an exam and usually get a scholarship just to get admittance into secondary school (the equivalent of American high school). University education, while free at public universities, is even more competitive, and there are plenty of university graduates who can’t get jobs. The more attainable and sure economic value of children is as manual laborers on farms and in the household, and most parents have little or no education, so the focus is on having enough to eat, not on the distant and uncertain goal of higher education.

There is a social as well as an economic component to the lack of parenting. Respondents have often mentioned that women who have abortions do so because they want to remain mwali, that is, a young and sexually free woman. Many young women have children but choose to spend their time as they please while their children are raised by others or left to run around by themselves. Notwithstanding the clear-cut division of labor in raising children (what raising is done is done by women), fathers are often absent, as they may be crop traders who travel frequently, men who spend their days and nights drinking pombe (coconut liquor), men with co-wives and thus several different households often in several different villages, or mere casual partners of women.

Seeing children here still melts my heart, and seeing in person how difficult survival is for them given all the threats of disease and injury they face is very difficult. Their mothers too have the short end of the stick, with more work than they can do in a day, little control of economic resources, and a host of threats to their health and well-being as well. But it is still hard to wrap my head around the many differences in parenting between my world and this one. Apparently the oft-quoted “it takes a village to raise a child” is an African proverb, and I don’t doubt it, but sometimes I wonder just how much of their full potential many children reach when the people who raise them are focused on other things most of the time. I wonder how much more these children could attain if their parents and other caregivers were motivated and educated--and genuinely able--to care more about their development, learning, and character.