So this morning, like many mornings that we drive into the farm, we saw many people on the side of the road trying to get a ride into town, or out of town, or wherever they need to go. Miah and I have a sort of rule, for safety, that we will only pick up women and children on the farm roads or from the farm roads trying to get to Heidelburg. But even then, it is so hard to just drive past these men who can clearly see that we have space in our warm car while they have to stay in the cold and spend half an hour to an hour trying to find someone to take them into town.
But this morning, as usual, we saw a woman with a baby and two small kids walking along the 9km dirt road, so we stopped to pick them up. Most of them don’t speak English too well, so I usually settle on speaking through smiles, laughter, hand motions, or the minuscule amount of Zulu that I know. This morning, I looked back as they settled into the seats and smiled at the little girl behind me. But her face made an impression on my mind that I think will stay with me a long time. She looked at me with what seemed like a look of shame, and confusion.
I tried to put myself in her shoes and this questioned burned in my head, I felt like she was questioning in a way that only young innocent minds can question, “What makes you so different that you get this warm car while I have to walk for miles every morning holding my little sister’s hand?” And my only answer to this question was that I had had the privilege of being born in the United States, while she, she had the privilege, yes privilege, of being born here in Africa. I know that when we look on the physical, immediately we can see that I am the blessed one. But I have had the opportunity to experience more than what we can see and feel. I have experienced the profound, resilient, beautiful spirit of the African people. And when I think about the spiritual, I believe that they are the blessed ones. And I see a freedom in that spirit that Americans rarely experience, if they experience it at all. Now, we could all go into arguments of what is the actual definition of blessing, etc, but at this particular moment in history when I was in the car with this little girl, even though our cultures are worlds apart, I knew that there was a common bond of humanity and womanhood that united us, and that this bond is a powerful connection. Near the end of the car ride, this little girl’s sister just burst out laughing, and then she started laughing as well. I don’t know what she was really laughing about, but by the end of the ride, we were all laughing. Beautiful.
Posted by michelle at 12:58 PM. Filed under:
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