treatment of children

There was in article on BBC News recently that dealt with keeping Syrian children in school. The life of a child here is so different from in the U.S. The happy, healthy children seem to dominate their parents in public. You will be sitting in a nice restaurant, and two screaming boys will dart under your table, while their parents sit smoking and chatting up a storm a few yards away, unaware or indifferent. However, in our Sharia Qassa house, we can hear the yelling matches that go on in the next-door apartment, and it is fairly clear that the mother of the house beats her children.

When we were at the pyramids, Kate and Bill rented horses to ride. Even with my complete lack of horse knowledge, I could tell that the horses were weak and badly cared for. The horses wouldn't run, even after being hit repetitiously with whips by the young boy who was assigned to be the guide. These were not just scraps of clothe, but whips with worn-in knots at the end. Kate said that eventually she couldn't handle the mistreatment of her horse, so she told the young boy that they wanted to head back to the stable and wait for us (after my last horse-in-front-of-the-pyramids experience, I opted for a camel, along with Jesse and Cooper). After desperately trying to convince Kate and Bill to continue riding, pleading with them that the horses would go faster, that he would ride with them, that they could have extra time, the boy broke down in sobs. Kate was taken aback, and asked him what was wrong, saying that of course they would still pay him. He pointed back at the head-guide, who was riding camels with us, and mimicked being hit. Nothing that Kate and Bill said, even when they gave him an extra-large tip and praised him to another man at the stable, changed the state of this little boy.

It's situations like those that I feel show the difference between child work and child slavery. In Petra, kids run around trying to get your attention, whether to sell you a necklace or grab your hand and give you a tour. But those kids are also the ones sitting in groups on rocks near the amphitheater, eating candy as they play with dogs. They are, without a doubt, being used as adorable wide-eyed tools by their parents to earn money. But there is a difference in my mind between pushing kids to manipulate tourists and forcing them to pull the rein of a horse with the knowledge that if no tip is earned, pain will follow. Neither is right or good, but they are different. Understanding this behavior is not cultural sensitivity, it is a cultural excuse. Some things I simply do not understand, nor do I want to.