A child’s responsibility

IN my village, growing up in a house meant living with your siblings and parents.
As one grew older from the age of two onwards, depending on your gender, one was thought the rudiments of life and expectations.
After one ate there should be water to wash down the food.
If one was to cook, there must be firewood to cook the food.
If food meant to feed the family was in the outlaying gardens, this food had to be brought home.
Many of the menial tasks involved required helping hands from the children.
The general rule of law was that all hands must be involved in one way or another so that the routine cycle of a family unit was cohesive to be effective.
That meant responsibility fell on young shoulders who took it in their stride and it became a part of them.
I grew up in that society where I took responsibility of my actions, knowing full well that if I didn’t do my duty, I was upsetting the status quo, likewise, my siblings felt the same.
This was learning a life skill, I was being groomed, cultured and taught at an early age the skills I would require as an adult.
My sister was being taught life skills she would require as woman.
We would become parents one day and these were the life skills we would pass on to our children.
The scenario has changed for me as an educated working class person. But the skills I learnt are still with me and I convince my children that this is how life is meant to be.
We must take responsibility to ensure our children are taught the life skills required to become responsible and hardworking citizens.
Not every event the world pushes down our throats were meant for us in our cultural context.
In today’s culture, a day like World Day Against (WDA) Child Labour is an excuse for our children to use against their parents and society in general.
They tend to use such other days to become lazy in all respects; physical laziness to clean around the house, go to the market for garden food supplies or sit outside the house gate to do simple vending of the odd cigarette complimented by the PNG’s favourite nut.
You see our youth gather in groups, passing around short cigarettes and odd looking cut off caps of the coca cola plastic bottles.
Is this what we want to promote in our society?
Who is taking responsibility of for that?
I for one put the blame squarely on the door step of such days like WDA Child Labour.
WDA Child Labour was devised to encourage laziness for third world countries for our young to hang around, carry boom boxes on their shoulders, in their bilums and pockets and in general make fools out of our children.
In fact in Papua New Guinea, we observe some events which are irrelevant to us.
The Queen’s Birthday is a waste of a full day.
With all due respect to the Queen, it didn’t take a whole day for to be born (i.e the Queen Mother didn’t go through labour the whole day).
So we or those countries that come under the Commonwealth should observe the Queen’s Birthday for half a day only.
In fact, we should do away with unnecessary holidays before we become a country full of lazy people and instead get on living our lives to develop this country to the next level of in all sense.

Richard Yasi ,
Waigani