Culture. A teacher at school today lectured several hundred students, after they had been rude and disrespectful to another teacher, that they had no culture. I don't really know what that means, but it stuck with me.
Maybe it's that they aren't perfect, upstanding citizens. But show me a school in the world where kids don't act like kids and I think the teachers won't act like teachers. The very presence of someone who considers themselves a disciplinarian, lording it over unwilling subjects, seems to promote rebellion. So what did this teacher really expect from her kids?
We've been having discipline problems with the local kids, throwing rocks at our house, stealing small items, leaving trash on our front "lawn", etc. I told Kingston about it and he went outside and beat one of the kids - not enough to make him cry, but enough to stem the tide for a little while. He said that the physical punishment approach was the only one that worked, and I couldn't help but agree. It seems that we've been through every other method. I even spoke with some families today, and got brush-offs. Part of me wants to think that our neighbors dislike us. But most of me knows that they don't understand us as we don't understand them. I feel handcuffed, though, as I do honestly try, to no avail.
Culture. The culture here is very strong. It is a culture that has a very unaware root connection to traditional values without much of the clothing, songs, dances, words or role models that can be found in countries or even provinces close to ours. It is a culture that has been so stonewashed that it's grasping at straws - Western culture, primarily - for some way to get back into the global dynamic.
And so I looked at this teacher, dressed in Western clothes, speaking a Western language, complaining about a lack of culture.
Now I see an unnatural tie between people of my town here and America. I think we're in a similar crisis - we imitate what we see as "good" but hang on to those intangibles that undermine the "good". If we only realized that those things we fail to see are the very things we should cultivate without wishing for more, maybe we might find this elusive "culture".
Peace
John
