A Heart Full

I have bits of words from the musical Les Miserables stuck in my head, ‘A heart full of love….In my life…..touches my life….waiting near…waiting here’.

I have been on the African continent since November, experiencing the ebb and flow my heartbeats, skips, and aches.

Last night I picked up a book about a Aussie woman’s experience living and working in S.Africa, and since then I am finding it difficult to ignore the aches. Page 28 finds me on the verge of tipping over. I have continually fought back the urge to get my computer and type this, yet page 28 won. I now sit in the large spacious common room in Durban’s hostel, The Happy Hippo and wonder if I should move back to my room where tears in waiting might be better received.

The author arrived in South Africa in 1988, during apartheid. She talks about how her whole life she dreamt of coming to Africa, and how she was prepared to fall in love. She was surprised at the underlying hostility she felt once crossing the border from Zimbabwe into SA.

I too feel it.

I’ve spent my time with Black, white, and mixed race, what here is termed ’coloured’, yet the majority of my time has been with whites. I wonder why that happens. In Tanzania and Ethiopia that was not the case, yet whites are also the minority there. Yet here, wandering around on my own, I still tended towards meeting and befriending other white people. Walking down the street in Wellington, the small town I stayed while working on a wine farm, it was white people who waved me over to the local watering hole and insisted on buying me a drink. Yet last night in a huge Texas like thunder and lightening storm, it was a Black man that rolled down his window during the tumultuous rain and asked if I was lost. I then followed him to the street that would lead me to my night’s destination. People are kind. People are good.

Yesterday, I failed to give a young Black man a ride out of the National Game Park. I felt guilty the entire drive out. I have given loads of women lifts, yet never a man-regardless of color, though honestly a white man was never asking. Would I have turned that young man down had he been white? I hope so (as does my brother Jared), but…

One cannot help but to continually role the ideas of race around in this country. As the farmer I worked for said, “We are all just one race-the human race. Race is just fabricated by us as an excuse.”

But is it really this country? I often find myself struggling with such issues and ideas at home as well. What would have been my life like had I bought a house in Oakland? Would I be more aware of the problems, as I would be more a part of a Black community? Has my life been kept idyllic living in sweet suburban Campbell?

When I was around 7 or 8 my mom asked me if I had anything against Asians. What?? She went on to say that she had noticed that I did not have any Asian friends and wanted to make sure that I felt positively towards all people. I wonder if my mom remembers this, as the impression it made on me has never faded. I believe I made an effort to create my own little United Nations circle of friends. Yet looking back, I do not believe I had any Black friends. Did she only ask about the kids in my neighborhood? I don’t even remembering having Black classmates until middle school.

Since I’ve gone back to my childhood, I am going to dredge up a haunting memory. Many of you know I wear contacts and glasses. I did not get contacts until I was a freshman in high school, and as a child my glasses were Coke bottle thick. I was often made fun of and taunted due to my ugly ducking goggles. During the ride home from a field trip to Marine World some kid from another school made fun of me with the usual taunts of Four Eyed Freak and Ugly. Now these were nothing new to me, I got them at home regularly from my brothers so one might have thought I’d built up a tough skin by then. But no, I found that I finally had something hurtful I could say back. So I called the kid a Nigger.

It worked, though like me- he was able to quickly cover up his hurt with anger and his verbal barrage started a fresh. I have no idea what he said back then, but still now, I remember the moments after I said it felt as if a heavy weight came down on my chest and shoulders, pinning me to that place while the rest of me was desperately trying to run away.

Again the impression of that moment has never faded. That I retaliated with hate, and with something that my young mind did not quite comprehend the power of. I learned young, that that was something I did not ever want to repeat. Not just using a racially derogatory word, but spitting back hate.

This has been a bit of a purge, now hasn’t it? Bear with me.

Africa, and more particularly, South Africa brings to surface all of these confused feelings of race. Yet, digging deeper, it is really about where we all fit in. Having a place in the world where one feels accepted, valued, and has the ability to prosper are the basics needs of the human experience.

Hence page 28 of Sandy Blackburn’s Holding Up the Sky.

“… to believe in God means to care about what is happening in the lives of people around you.”
Now this has a bit of a stickiness to it for me due to the reference of God. So if I take the word God out, and substitute it with us. Us meaning, we the people of the planet earth, I feel calmer about my place here is the world because I know I care.

Blackburn continues to explain her purpose as part of a mixed group making presentations to high school students in the Durban area during apartheid, “ We were attempting to communicate that if you were black you could not avoid politics; and that if you white, you were still impacted by politics although it felt far less uncomfortable.”

Campbell is far less uncomfortable than Oakland. The U.S. is far less uncomfortable than Africa. My life has been far far less uncomfortable than probably 90% of the world’s population.

So what am I doing about it?

My baby step is caring about what is happening in the lives of people around me. I still have more white friends than Asain or Black, but I do care about others.

And Africa fills my heart with that.