Chapters 1 "Aunt Safiyya"

After I finished the first two chapters of "Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery", I was a little confused. Not confused in the way that I didn't comprehend what I read, I know what had happened to the characters, the storyline, and such. I was more confused about the reason why the events had taken place.
The first chapter describes the actual Monastery, saying that you couldn't see it at all from the village, and was about a half an hour walk away. The reader is then informally introduced to the monks that reside there, and a sentence or two is said about their generosity (The speaker remembers that he was given sugared dates only grown within the Monastery walls, pg. 19)
The speaker then goes on about how every "Coptic Christmas" his mother assembles boxes of treats and sends them on their way to family member houses, and the Monastery.
I realized that only about two pages into the actual story there was already a connection between the Eastern world and my own, here in the 'West'. Is it not uncommon for families to send gifts, or gift-baskets and the like, to family members (and in religious families’ cases, their church, pastor, priest, etc...)? This was a positive thing in my mind, to be able to pick up my first piece of Middle Eastern literature and make an almost immediate connection between the culture and my own.
Then, however, my personal connection faltered. Within the same page (pg. 20-21) it was brought to my attention that a lot of responsibility is put upon the daughters in Middle Eastern families, and yet they are treated the harshest. Taher gives some insight into this 'twisted' (from my point of view) family dynamic, saying that if the responsibility of carrying a tray of cookies down the roads of the village went to one of his sisters, and by some twist of fate they dropped the tray, "The girl would return home with all this [smashed cookies and expensive ghurayyiba], in tears, and my mother would receive her with blows and kicks for her unforgiveable clumsiness, all the while bewailing the bad luck that had cursed her with the birth of such daughters."
This simple, yet harsh, sentence was the first picture painted in my head about the family dynamics in the Middle East. In America, it is very uncommon to actually hit a child as a form of punishment, unless one was talking about a small child getting a light 'spanking'. However the very words 'blows' and 'kicks' don’t exactly give the image of a light punishment. And then, add on top of it the fact that the mother would then go around 'bewailing and cursing' the fact that she was the mother of her children is definitely something that would be unheard of in America. I plan on researching a little more into this, however general knowledge I have gained about the Middle East ( no matter how little it may be) have me thinking that this type of behavior relating mother and daughter would not be uncommon. I know that men are above women in said regions society.
The rest of the chapter talks mainly about The Miqaddis Bishai, (Miqaddis being a formal title). The remainder of chapter one tells of his insight to planting and harvesting, and how he is a familiar face in the village, everyone knows him and he, in return, knows everybody. This is more embellished in the story, but so far the details don't relate back to the story, yet.