post # 1 from december

December 11, 2008
The past few days I have been going from house to house to house all day long, greeting people with the special greeting reserved for the big holidays here: "Mbruk L3id!" It is the largest festival of the year, L3id Amqrant. It lasts 3 days, or 5 days, or 10 days depending on who you ask. Formally three days I think, judging from the number of people who have told me that. This is important information for me, because I need to know just how much time I have to try to go to the house of everyone I know and greet them and be persuaded to sit down and have tea and a kabab or two and maybe some bread and olive oil… in other words there is a whole lot of eating going on here! And I have learned (once again) that there is a definite limit to how much protein + oil + fat that I can eat and digest happily. Unfortunately I do not know exactly where that limit falls… and marinated kebabs made of just-slaughtered-this-morning-lamb happen to be delicious! So I just try to pace myself…
Interestingly, yesterday and today I kept getting asked about how things work in the US. Ie. are your children yuar (troublesome) too? Do wives fight with their husbands in the US? Yes, and yes. Or, perhaps more accurately, there are difficult children and easy children everywhere, and I imagine most wives and husbands run up against each other at least once and a while. Being two separate people and all… Not having the time, I didn’t go into detail. That is to say, yes we have difficult children, but there is a slightly different ethic of discipline. I’ll describe the way it is here since that is easier for me to put into words. When a child is young here, they are more or less (depending on the family) the center of the planet. Even moreso if they are male. And the favorite method for making a child to stop crying is to give them what they want. The predictable result is that they become quite spoiled. At least for a while… in most families, this is balanced by the fact that they child slowly learns that everyone else is equally (or slightly less equally if they are female) entitled to what they want as well. The importance of family and community is slowly taught to the child. I wonder if a lack of contentment is also taught, but I’m not so sure about that. It seems to work alright for the most part.
Of course, there are children who are just spoiled too. The children that prompted the question are two of the most spoiled little one I have ever seen. A little boy and his older sister girl, who are constantly vying for the attention of everyone around, and are especially concerned with getting as much or more as their sibling… for example, we sat down for the evening snack (kaskarot) and the hostess put down a plate of cookies. The little boy had been sitting there sipping his tea with a taunting eye on his sister (who had none… remember tea here is so sweet it might as well be soda) when he spotted the cookies. It was classic! His face lit up and he said "Gateau!" or "Cookies!" And proceeded to grab handfuls. His sister was right behind them, and soon they had half the plate in their collective possession… leaving the rest of us (four or five people) to the rest. Fortunately, the hostess (not their mother) is a no-nonsense kind of women. "Ee-HEE!" she said (that means no). "You get only one at a time!" And she grabbed the whole lot of them out of both of their hands and then handed each back one. No tears, they know not to mess with this woman. Contrast the screams and tears when their mother mediated a fight over actual soda the day before. In a word, piercing. It reminded me so of Captains Courageous, when the little boy is so spoiled in the beginning!! Its interesting, because their mother gets mad at them for behaving poorly, but doesn’t get after them until they cross a certain line, nor does she respond when other people point out her children’s misbehavior. She only disciplines what she sees. I am certain that there are mothers like this in the US, even though I haven’t had the opportunity to observe them so closely. As I still do not (to my frustration) understand the whole of what is said the whole of the time, I have plenty of opportunity for careful observation!