The Girls Next Door

Impromptu traditional dancing; unrelated to this entry

Next door to me lives a fairly typical family. They stay in a one-room house, which is really classy by the standards of the village. The house was built by the trust, so it looks reasonably finished (as opposed to the more common mud/dung-walled houses) and it doesn't leak. Best of all, it has running water and electricity, which I would estimate only 5% of the houses in the village have.

Within this house stays an ever-changing collection of women. The chief occupant is P, who works in my Trust as an assistant to the Health program. P's salary pays for the rent on the house. With her stay the following ladies: P's three daughters, occasionally P's sister, occasionally P's niece, occasionally the children of the sister and the niece, and occasionally some random women I do not know. P's husband is a teacher in a far-distant settlement, so he comes to visit on school holidays. When he comes over, they usually kick the girls out of the house to stay in the empty house behind the office. I don't think that this is technically allowed, but such is life in a one-room house with 4-8 occupants.

The final occupant of this house is a toddler, about 16 months old. This girl, L, is in the unfortunate position of being hated and neglected by all.

Let me preface this by saying that neglected children are an oddity around here. In general, San people take incredibly good care of their children - they are constantly with their babies, playing, feeding, talking to, and generally caring for them. Children take top priority, and I have rarely seen anyone be harsh to a child. The unlucky L, however, is the daughter of an "ex" girlfriend of P's husband - the "ex" is in quote marks because it's clear that, since P and her husband have been together for at least ten years, L is the product of an extramarital affair. Not so unusual. The difficult part is that L's mother, apparently unable to care for her daughter, passed the responsibility onto the father. And the father, apparently unable to care for his daughter, passed the responsibility onto his wife. P, understandably, is none too thrilled about having to provide for the daughter of her husband's ex-mistress.

So L is neglected. I find myself very conflicted. P has a daughter about the same age as L, and it's heartbreaking to see this most perfect of social experiments being played out: two girls, sharing half their genetic material, are raised in the same house, but one is drenched in love and the other is simply fed and left to sit in the dirt. L is always crying. I found it incredibly irritating until I realized why she was crying; now I want to comfort her. However, as I keep reminding myself, a child is not a cat - it's a terrible idea on many levels for me to get involved in this situation. So many aspects of it are foreign to me; the casual passing-around of babies, the acceptance of unfaithful spouses, the communal living. I'm sure an unwanted baby is so much MORE irritating in an overpacked house. So I try to stay out of it.

What would you do? In P's position? In her husband's? In mine?

And to close, two irrelevant photographs:

Kimchi the cat.
Sprawled in her preferred spot on my desk, messing up all of my wires. I think she likes the heat coming from the little cooling fan of my laptop.

The road is beautiful and long.
This is from the area where we're trying to set up the game farm.