What concepts in the Sawi culture intrigued / reviled / saddened / angered / surprised you?

Reading the "Peace Child" gave me a general scope of the Sawi culture. The most intriguing concept was in chapter 14, when Yakub announces his marriage with Fasaha as his third wife but Nair decides against this, and for this reason a fight breaks out between the two sides. Yakub and his two friends Mavu and Sinar against Nair and his brother Paha. When Don Richardson enters this scene and seeing how serious the injuries are, he calls Carol to bring bandages and penicillin while Don stays at the scene, trying to deter Mavu from taking further advantage of his opponents in their weakened condition. When Carol returns, they together bandage up their wounds and by the time they are done with treating the lesions and injecting penicillin, their hands are bloody. Don mentions that he was "burning with desire to say something to him," but assumed that if he reprimanded Mavu for nearly killing killing two men, "he would only shrug his shoulders as if to say, "So what?"" Because Don thought that chastising Mavu would be futile, he says instead, "You have made my wife's hands bloody." The response to this is intriguing:
"The remark took him by surprise He glanced quickly at Carol's hands and a sudden realization of the inappropriateness of the scene he had helped to create seemed to startle him. Mavu winced, fearing he had unwittingly committed some dark impropriety of cosmic consequence."
The reason why I found this so captivating was because it seems, according to the implication of this passage, that Mavu never got to realize the damage that follows his actions, chiefly because no one ever told him. So when Don points out the consequence of his actions, Mavu is surprised and fears that he has "unwittingly committed some dark impropriety of cosmic consequence." I can extrapolate from this observation that the reason for the Sawi culture being the way it is is because they have never been exposed to anything else besides it.