How Many Students with Stones Does it Take to Bring Down a Thief?

Apparently 10

Communal justice is alive and well in Rwanda. Sometimes I randomly see a group people chasing a person through the streets and wonder what they are doing. When I ask someone they tell me whats happening they say they are chasing a thief. I’m never sure if they are joking or not but today, I got a definitive answer. So we at one of our awesome staff meetings. When I say the word awesome, I mean boring and way too long. We were off to a great start 1 hour in and not a thing accomplished until we hit this gem.

Follow the logic here. So we are talking about student safety and after exhausting the idea of a fire drill (which would be useless due to how spread out the classrooms are) we bounced around three other topics and came to hypothetical of a thief coming on campus. We discussed how we should react as teachers. (Bear in mind that our school is located in the middle of nowhere and the only thieves that exist are the students steeling from other students) It turns out the best thing to do is wait to make that the person is a thief and then act because we don’t want to accuse (or stone) an innocent person. Apparently the students are quite keen to stoning people after our dean of studies described the one time he was almost stoned by students. So apparently if the students catch wind of a thief, they’re going to be prepared with stones. So we ended talking about the downsides of stoning a thief. See the problem is that if all the students are throwing stones then they all aren’t going to hit the thief and some will hit other students and that would be bad (hitting the thief, totally acceptable). So after about 10 minutes of deliberation the final conclusion was that in the event that a thief came on campus to steal things and you as a teacher saw this happen, you should only allow 10 students to get rocks while disciplining the others and not allowing them to pick up rocks.

It’s funny, after hearing all the miraculous stories of forgiveness and redemption, you run into tidbits like these. Lesson learned, don’t be a thief in Rwanda