The White Guy

So, we’ve had some work going on in our yard prompted by a variety of reasons. Firstly, I have ALWAYS wanted a swing in my garden for my children. I wanted one when I myself was still a child. My parents bought my sister and I one to swing on together where there’s push pull and the township children enjoyed coming to use it. I wanted that for my future children.

Secondly, our screamer screams when it’s time to leave the public park. Not nice when members of the public are around. She also is hard to handle, goes after other’ balls they are playing with, touches people’s bicycles…Our talkative twin also adds to the chaos when she argues that she needs “just five more minutes” after multiple warnings.

Thirdly and sadly, there are weird people hanging around. About a month ago, as the teen daughter and her three younger siblings walked, a man in a B class Mercedes Benz asked them if they wanted a ride. They said no. Then he asked if they wanted to go to the arcade at Century City to play. They kept walking and saying no. He asked if they were sure they didn’t “want to go have fun.” *shudder* At that point, I not knowing what was happening but knowing it was starting to rain, told my son -who had stayed behind with our refusing to walk twin child – to take her into the car (That she always loves) and go fetch the others before they got rained on.

As he drove up behind them, seeing talking to the man, the man put his hand out the window to wave him around his car. When he realised that the children knew the driver and were going to the car, he zoomed off. As my teen told her brother what had happened, he then tried to chase the car. (Don’t ask me what he’d have done.) They lost him at an intersection.

Very disturbing.

Two Fridays ago as the same children were walking, the man slowly drove up behind them. Our teen noticed but pretended not to but then the two middle children saw the car and pointed at the man, who then sped up. Now, they were scared so our girl told them to run to a corner where they would go in any direction and the man wouldn’t know. So my poor, terrified children – age 28, 9, 8 and 4, ran.

That image is haunting. And so sad. Makes me tear up even typing it! I hate criminals!

I bought her CS-gas (tear gas) to spray at him if he ever follows them and tries to lure them into the car. And booked people to come build a jungle gym in the yard so there’s less walking outside.

Snippets of the building time.

The Pharaoh hat has a strange rubber thing that has been eating at our girl’s hair, so I coaxed her into only wearing it on Wednesdays and when they go out in public. They won’t understand why she has a pillow case or skirt on her head, but they’ll understand THAT!

One man asked if she’s Cleopatra. She has no clue who that is but answered indignantly, “I’m Pharaoh!”😅

One wanted to use the loo but waited for me to finish explaining some school work to my son, then asked if I run a daycare centre. Haha. Never thought that that is what it would look like. Told him nope, these are all my children.😊

Yesterday they came to fix a few issues and he (White supervisor, Black workers as is the norm in our country) started talking about how the poor are getting poorer and how distressing it is. I thought not of ourselves or my employed friends whose salaries are affording less and less, but of those who have no job at all and agreed with him.

Then he says, “In the 80’s it was better. I mean, yes, I was a child, but there was less of this then. Poverty wasn’t bad back then but now, the world over, everyone is struggling more and more.”

I thought to myself, “Man, do you know who you’re talking to? I was also a child in the 80’s and it was AWFUL for US! Tear gassed in the ghettoes your people forced us into. Police coming in to find and kill!?? Police causing rioting and fear!? Me seeing stabbings and people being burnt to death. And our people were dirt poor. Starving poor because we didn’t ‘deserve’ much pay for the few jobs we were ‘allowed’ and legally trained to do- menial, cheap labour. Oh my! It was worse back then!”

It’s scary how White people either don’t know what life was like for Black people during Apartheid, or they forget that Apartheid was recent! They had fun in their safe suburbs. We lived with guns, fear and flames! Add the grinding poverty where we were forced to take jobs that paid peanuts, ‘Black’ hospitals that really were almost like badly run clinics, disappearing neighbours and relatives caught my police to be tortured, aunts fleeing into exile out in Germany and the US, and high birth mortality rate and you have a time when things were much worse than they are now for us Africans of Africa.

But, he also said I wouldn’t know as I wasn’t born yet. I was too busy laughing internally and wanting to tell him how old I am but then his staff called him and I couldn’t.

I wonder if anybody anywhere will ever guess my real age. Even at church there’s a newcomer who was shocked when a young man we once even counseled before his marriage referred to my husband as “old man.” But he’s younger than you! The man exclaimed! Oh my! I therefore bet he also thinks the man is younger than me too. Maybe if my husband looked HIS age, they’d know I too was older?? Or they’d just think I’m like those celebrity men who date women 20 years younger than they are…

So yes, that distracted me too as he spoke and I didn’t get a chance after he was called, to revisit that comment. But I live the reality daily. Life was not ok for us in the 80’s. At least now we have the chance to earn what they earned. And some of us do indeed earn it and can help others who are unemployed or orphaned.

As my nine year old said, “So..If you and daddy are also helping Aunty P” (her birth mom) “then dad had better not lose his job or they will starve even more.”

Yep, and so would another dear one waiting for the job she qualified for but willing to do the ‘menial’ work reserved only for us previously unskilled, un-educated by Western standards people of the soil.

Things are better but will never be ok till the kingdom comes.