[Continued from HERE.]

In Malawi, as throughout Africa as a whole, families are strong and children are everything: they are not just an indicator of virility, but of wealth. They are caretakers of the other children. They help around the house. They will be carriers of unwritten history for the entire family and clan as they absorb the stories and histories told by their grandparents and parents only to one day do the same and pass them on to their own children. They are the strings that tie the past with the present, the present with the future, the future with the past.

They are a source of entertainment and derision and tears and laughter and hope and anxiety and the major occupier of one’s time. They are social security for when one becomes too old to look after themselves as most countries have no governmental social security funds. They are a guarantee that one won’t die alone, that one will be remembered and will continue, somehow, infinitely.

Yes, children are everything to Malawians. They are not just a sideshow... they are THE show, in many ways.

This brings us to one of the widest points in the culture gap between the U.S. and Malawi relating to the M Fray and adoption: the essence of ownership of children. In Malawi, ties between children and their adults are tight with an intricate system of rights and responsibilities, traditions and roles. These strong ties, however, are not just to the immediate family. Children are “owned” not just by their parents, brothers and sisters, but also by the extended family, the community around them, their tribe, their nation, even their continent as a whole. Child rearing is a community occupation, not just a mother/father endeavor.

While this is changing in the cities, in the villages and even smaller towns with tight, village-like neighborhoods, my child is your child is… you get the point. If my child is doing something wrong and you, my neighbor, see it, you will go over and discipline the child. You would never just purse your lips and think, disgustedly, “My child would NEVER behave THAT badly!” Or, “That kid is a MONSTER!”

If you, my neighbor, need someone to look out for your children while you go to the field to grow your vegetables, I will do that for you. Children run around freely, not staying in sight of their parents simply because everyone older than them is a surrogate parent. A six-year-old girl will carry around her six-month-old sister on her back while scolding the neighbor’s three-year-old for knocking the greens she is washing for lunch on the ground. The old man walking by will break up a fight between two boys even if he doesn’t live there, he is just passing through.

The philosophy is best explained with beautiful simplicity by a proverb that exists in one form or another in every African country: “It takes a whole village to raise a child.”

[Continued in the next M Fray blog: Adoption by whose standards?]