This place never ceases to amaze

So yesterday I´m standing outside the computer lab and hear a commotion coming towards me and see a 10 year old girl, along with two others guiding her, running toward the water faucet holding her forehead while crying. I then see that she has blood gushing from her forehead. What I quickly learned was that she was hit in the head by a stray rock thrown at someone else. This must have been a decent sized rock, and thrown pretty hard because there was a lot of blood.

Throwing rocks is a favorite pasttime of the kids here, largely because they are widely available and there is not a lot else to do during recess. Most of them also do not see, or do not care, that it is not a particularly safe activity for everyone in the school yard. The thing that was most disconcerting yesterday was the fact that, while the teachers were tending to the injured girl, other kids were nearby throwing rocks at each other (separate incidents) as if nothing were happening 15 feet away. This just blows my mind.

20 seconds ago as I was writing this, I see a student pick up a handful of rocks and absentmindedly toss them a few feet away at nothing in particular. While this, in and of itself, is not anything to get upset about, it is symptomatic of the larger problem. How can this problem be solved? I´m not quite sure, and it will probably require changes in a lot of areas. One thing I would like to see, however, is the teachers here actually take a stand on this issue and actually try to enforce some sort of rule against rock throwing because nothing we say seems to make much of a difference. Unfortunately, most of the teachers don´t do a whole hell of a lot during recess. OK, that´s my rant for the day.