How do you feel about Hitting?

I work a ½ day on Fridays and that’s the day I get to pick O up from school. Every couple of weeks or so I try to skip out early and make it to his school at lunch time so that we can eat together. I feel like parents should be welcomed at any school their child attends and at his current school I have always been made to feel that way. Last week I got my lunch to go, bought a bucket of raspberries and headed over to have lunch. Now this school lunch time is not like anything you are thinking of…all of the 60 or so kids eat together in one little room, sitting around their tables and waiting for their lunch to be served. ITS CHAOS! Controlled CHAOS maybe, but CHAOS none the less (or maybe that’s how it always is at lunch time with kiddos?) Its loud and the teachers are tired and the cooks just want to serve the food and the kids just want to eat. That day they were having noodles with peas and ground beef (barf!) and O was macking it down. When I walked in the kids started getting up and coming over to say hi and getting all excited. It’s pretty cute unless you’re one of the people trying to reign in the CHAOS. They were all excited because when I come I usually try to bring some sort of fruit – usually strawberries or raspberries or something called a gaperi (not sure that’s how you spell it – kinda like a sweet gooseberry) for everyone to share. So there I am sitting on a little wooden chair, eating my sandwich, talking with O and the kids at our table and I see this little boy named Owen come over from his table to see what’s up. Owen is in O’s class and I know who he is – so it’s even more expected that he would come over. Then I see this “teacher” that I don’t know come over while Owen is talking to me and she hits him across the back of the head and in Kinyarwandan tells him to go sit back down. Owen starts crying, goes and sits back down and I stand up. I put my hand out and introduce myself saying “Hi, I am Orion’s mom. Who are you” She shakes my hand and states her name. I say “nice to meet you, if I ever see you hit another child in front of me again I will file a report with the authorities”. I don’t really know if there are any “authorities” to file a report with but still…I was overwhelmed with her violence. I told her there were a million other ways to discipline a child and hitting them just shows that hitting is ok. She told me she was a mom and a Christian as if this made up for smacking a three year old kid. I spoke with O’s teacher – who we love – who told me that the new lady was a teachers aid in another class. I told O’s teacher that I don’t support hitting kids and that if she ever had issues with O to call Eric or myself and to not hit him. I don’t know how I feel about this interaction and days later I am still processing it. My gut reaction was to pull O out of school but he loves it and told us that he has never been hit. Is it cultural? Eric says he thinks only the Rwandan kids get hit and not any of the international kids that go to the school. That makes me feel even worse. I asked a Rwandan woman I work with about this and she agreed with Eric – she said that culturally any adult is encourage to discipline a child that is misbehaving. Discipline…sure, smack across the head…I just don’t know. My colleague then went on to say that the First Lady of Rwanda made announcements that you should treat every child like your own and I have seen billboards that speak to this but I still have a hard time with hitting a kid.