infection

Considering that not much happened today, I find that the evening has settled in with a terribly dark wave of concern.

While sitting in class this morning, watching Sisca scold and hit the children who weren’t paying attention, I found myself wondering exactly what she was saying to them. She speaks in a garbled blend of Setswana and English, so I asked her to translate.

She laughed for a while, yelled some more, rapped Bridget’s shaved head, and said, “Eh, I tell them that’s how African children are! They learn from the whip not from the word.” Stunned, and feeling suddenly panicky, I opened my mouth to disagree – to force forth something, anything that could possibly begin to counter such a horrible statement. However, Sisca had already begun to review the different types of clothing we wear in the winter and I clamped my jaw in silence.

Five minutes later, when chatter on the rug began again, a laughing Sisca once more translated her torrent of reprimands. “Eh, I am saying they are not like white children, they don’t listen to words. They are black children. They are African children.”

This time, I was quicker, and replied in my most respectful tone with statements like “learning and listening have nothing to do with skin color,” and “it takes a while for ALL children to learn to listen to instructions.” Sisca smiled warmly at me – making it unclear if she understood or just thought I was naïve – and continued yelling.

I can’t decide which is sadder: that these poor children are being infected with thoughts that are just as damaging to the mind as the physical disease that has ravaged this nation, or that a grown woman, a mother, an accredited, kind, smart woman truly believes that her skin color in some way makes her different or inferior. And in the end, perhaps this kind of sadness really can’t be quantified, so comparison is irrelevant. It really makes me physically ill to imagine what is happening in these children’s minds as a result of these assertions.

Today was not the first time that Sisca said something like this. Maybe a week and a half into my time at the day care, she asked me to read to the children from a book of nursery rhymes. As I recited lines from Humpty Dumpty in my most animated voice (both high and lyrical from 10 years in children’s theatre), the kids repeated my words, mimicking my tones volume (as all small children are apt to do.) After just a few moments, Sisca began to laugh hysterically and started chiding them in Setswana, informing me that she was telling them to speak like “Black people.” “They are black,” she told me, “they cannot speak like you.” I wanted to scream. I wanted to shake her and tell her that my voice has nothing to do with my appearances, that it has everything to do with my parents, and my nationality, and where I grew up, and the shows I was in, and my personality. I wanted to spend a year telling the kids that they were wonderful and capable and fine, and could speak however they chose. I wanted to distribute books on civil rights movements, on biology, on history.

“Hey diddle diddle,” I said.



The other disturbing event that scarred the skin of the past few days was a brief encounter I had at River Walk on Sunday. Crossing the parking lot to reach a shop, Abby and I were suddenly confronted by a disheveled looking woman, who dropped a sack at my feet and began mumbling frantically, while searching her bosom for something inside. We were frozen in surprise as she pulled out a tattered passport and began to plead. “I am from Zimbabwe,” she gasped, “I have gotten stuck here, I need to get back home, I need you to help me, please I am stuck here, please. PLEASE. You must help me…” Strangely frightened by the desperation in her voice, we both automatically began to move away, stepping backwards in awkward unison – curtly, terribly, painfully, firmly refusing to let her continue.

I don’t know what made me shut off, because a few seconds later, around the corner and out of sight, I immediately regained feelings of overwhelming pity and guilt. My head was flooded with questions of “what could I really do to help?” “does she have family there?” “why didn’t I listen?” “should I have given her money?” “will she ever get back?” “how many people have walked away before?” and I felt so heavy that I could swear they were crushing me. Just that morning I had read about Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision to drop out of the run-off election, and this only compounded my confusion. How could this woman want to go back? What is she going back to? How many people would rather be in Botswana than trapped in Zimbabwe?



A lot of the events that I consider important in the past few days have been brief in actuality but of infinite mental duration. I keep replaying the moments mentioned, and each time they flash across my mind’s eye, my list of concerns and questions grows exponentially. Mainly I wonder how the national body can possibly fight so many things at once: HIV, regional instability, and the colonial infection of self-oppression.