In The Beginning by Richard Webber

  Chapter Forty Four

  I was incredibly relieved to finally be home, but the stench of evil and the overwhelming corruption that had surrounded the eastern village haunted my mind. Gratefully, as the responsibilities of my kingdom and family pressed upon me, thoughts of the eastern tribe eventually faded into the background of my consciousness, though they never fully disappeared.

  Though we had been gone less than two months, it felt like an eternity. It was so good to see Kalou’s face every day. Enoch was now speaking quite well, and Garon was just taking his first steps. Things change so quickly with little ones, and it took several days to catch up on all that had happened in my absence.

  Kalou and the boys had fared well while I was gone, and the joy I felt at being together with my family once again surprised me. The deep emotional bond I had developed with my wife over our years together, first as friends and then as mates, had grown to the point where I could not even imagine a world where she was not beside me. My sons were my pride, and I looked forward to the time I was able to spend with them. For a few days we barely left the house, but instead stayed in as a family, talking, playing and enjoying each others’ company.

  But eventually the responsibilities of my kingdom called, and I had to return to my duties. My immediate concern was to get the easterners settled into the community, and this was more complex than it would have appeared at first. We had built additional houses in advance to accommodate the expected influx of new people, as had happened when the Southerners joined us. But the easterners were a very different situation. The Southerners, though they had needed to learn our language and ways, had come as a tribe very similar to us in customs and values. The easterners on the other hand, came from a dysfunctional tribe with a corrupt value system.

  In their tribe you did only what was ordered of you by someone who was more powerful than you. Stealing, lying and cheating were considered legitimate survival techniques, things that you did to get through the day unharmed. Though they were the best of the easterners, they had still grown up and lived in a society that was ruled by fear and pain.

  These were all essentially good people, but because of the wicked environment they had lived in all their lives they could not yet be expected to know how to live in a fair and reasonable society where people tried to work for the common good. I knew it was going to be much more difficult to integrate these people into our tribe than it had been for the southern tribe.

  We needed to teach them how to interact with other people in an honest and trustworthy manner, as well as all the basic skills such as our language and how to live in our city. They had to learn how to live in a society where work was done voluntarily, and food and the necessities of life were earned through the work you did.

  I needed to get all the easterners into homes where they would see and learn how we lived. I wanted them to understand that force did not make us work together, but the desire to help the tribe and do the right thing was what drove our behavior. The best way to do this was to have all the newcomers live in established homes. Adapting to the social behavior that was expected of them, as well as being taught how to keep up a home, learn our language, and learn a trade would be easiest if they were around it constantly every day.

  Each married family went to live with an older couple whose children had begun to leave the house. Though there were still some children left in each home, there was plenty of space for more people, and I believed that seeing how the host family raised their children would teach them to raise their children properly. Though the eastern parents loved their children, they had never seen how functional families acted, so they needed to learn from the ground up.

  The single women, both mothers with children and those with no children, also went to live with families for the time being. Here again, seeing the behavior modeled by solid and well-adjusted families was the best way to teach these women what was expected of them in our society.

  I really didn’t know if this would work, but it seemed logical to me. I believed they just needed the proper role models in order to get rid of the behaviors they had developed to survive in their old tribe. I hoped I was right, but only time would tell.