I read another children’s story in class today. It reminded me of the last time I read one. The first time I read one, I blogged about my reaction but I can’t find the page. That story was about a man that wanted to build a house. He had an axe head, but no handle. He went to the forest and asked the trees (they were sentient) for a small piece of wood so that he could make his axe. The trees decided that they would give it to him if he promised never to come back. He agreed and he got his handle. He made his axe and then decided that he still wanted his house. So he went back to the forest. The trees asked him why he had come back and he said that he had changed his mind, then he cut them all down (killed them) and he lived in his new house. Charming, eh? The point was supposed to be that you shouldn’t give people the seeds of your own destruction, but it comes off more as a story telling you that you can get what you want if you’re willing to lie and betray people that trust you…
This one was just as bad. Here’s the plot… A man lives in a cave and one day he notices an adder living in a small hole in his cave. Because the snake doesn’t do anything to him, he leaves it alone and they live together without a problem. One day, the snake leaves and the guy looks into the hole where the snake lives and sees several baby snakes. He decides to take them and see what the mother will do. So he hides them somewhere and leaves. The snake comes back and sees that her babies are gone. She looks everywhere and can’t find them. She decides that the man has done something to them, so she poisons his water jug. She then leaves and the man comes back. He puts the baby snakes back, unharmed. The snake comes back, sees that her babies are fine, then goes over and spills all of the water so that the man isn’t poisoned.
What a pointless story, right? Wrong! We are supposed to learn the value of faithfulness and being a real friend from this story. You see, the man tested the friendship of the snake, and the snake saved the man when she realized that she was being tested…
I struggled and struggled trying to figure this out. I assumed that I had missed something. Mahmoud was very patient and explained to me that it was not only important to test a friendship, he actually used the word necessary. Why? To see if they were really your friend of course. I still didn’t want to understand, so he asked me if he took my kids, just for an hour, and then returned them after I had been looking for them, wouldn’t that be funny? Wow, he actually made me really angry. I told him to remind me never to leave my kids around him… Then he said, OK, maybe not your kids, how about my cell phone? I said, in English because he doesn’t understand it, that we have a name for people that think that’s funny. We call them assholes. Then I told him in Arabic that that’s something I would expect a 7 year old to do. He said, maybe in America, but that is good here….
I shouldn’t be surprised, it was at his house that I was laughed at by 5 Yemenis when my leg cramped up. I was in serious pain and couldn’t stand up or stretch, and they thought that it was hilarious. A culture that teaches that it’s important to put your friends to the test to see if you can trust them and delights in frustrating or terrifying (missing kids!) their friends for comic relief has some serious issues. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if that culture looks a lot like what it looks like here…