a hug

Yesterday afternoon, about 16:00, I went out for a stroll around Zoo Lake, a nice park area about a seven-minute walk away from my residence on Westcliff Drive. Several signs throughout the area note that the park has - and continues- to pride itself on being a place where people of all races gather to enjoy the outdoors.

One of the most obvious changes that I have noticed in my thinking while I've been in South Africa is a distinct consciousness of my race. I have suddenly become white. I analyze and attempt to control my actions based on the inescappable knowledge that I am white in and African city, in an African country. This awareness started even before I arrived: I remember sitting in the waiting area for South African Airways in Washington, D.C. debating whether I should type on my laptop, should strike up conversations with the various different people around me, etc. When I did end up talking to the future passengers, they were all white: tourists heading on safari, farmers heading back to review their crops and manage their estates, and a couple of other white students like me. All the time I was talking to them, I could not help but feel a little ashamed, wondering what the African lady sitting behind me was thinking about our conversation...

Since I have settled in my suburb of Jo-Burg, I continue to struggle daily with how my facial expressions, body language, and even the tone of my "hello" comes across to the African people I see daily on walks down the street, in the local Spar grocery store, and on the street corner outside the church. I think that really this worry has made me paranoid to the point of being less friendly: the harder I try to appear friendly, or more accurately, the harder I try to communicate my apology and some sort of acknowledgement that somehow I understand (which I will never fully be able to do), the less friendly, or whatever, I become.

With this worry and fear in mind, I must admit that I was startled about what to do when a small black African girl, a toddler of about two, ran over to the path where I was walking and gave me a hug. Walking hand-in-hand with her mother, a graceful lady in a denim jacket and dress pants, she had smiled at me with a huge-fearless grin and I graciously returned her smile and gave a little wave. But then she broke away with her mother and ran about 10 feet down the hill to where I was standing, I was worried that I had done something--wrong.

While I admit that I am not the most graceful with children, normally, if a young child approachs me in that way, I would immediately bend down and obligingly talk back to them in whatever little gaggle he or she happens to be speaking. However, when this girl ran towards me, I just sort of stood there and looked down at her. But, disarming my fears with her cute little hair-bows and still-glowing smile, I warily looked over at her mom, who was still standing the 10 feet away from me and not looking at me, and bent down to "talk" and smile. She immediately responded by grabbing my shoulder and babbling on. I must have stood there for about five minutes, intermittingly talking to the girl, looking over at her mom, standing back up, and then crouching back down again. Finally, I attempted to make gestures that she go back towards her mom, but it really tood her mother's call and eventual hand to convince her that she should go. Still smiling back at me, I waved goodbye and offered several compliments to her mother on her cuteness, etc. She smiled softly at me, and then proceeded to lead her daughter up the hill.

I stood there for a couple minutes more afterwards, thinking, with a bit of shame, about how my fear of how I would come across to this lady almost made me shun a small child just wanting a hug.

No wonder people so often say that their hope for the future is in children.