Early memory

We have the English content for our next lesson - we just need to work on the Sotho. Busy cause Monicca is planning her wedding ; )

What follows is a very vivid, early memory. I bathed in a horrible truth very early in my life - it was the basis for much of my ideas...

I hate loving this country. I hate what it is and I love what it is. I have seen horrible things in this country.

My eyes saw a man dying on the road, dying as he waited for help. Help arrives. It is the wrong kind of help. It is a whites only ambulance and it only takes white people. The dying man is not white, he is black. His blood is red.

I was looking out the car window just as we were passing the accident. My dad warned us not to look. It was too late. I was dreaming, eyes focused exactly where they would see a dying man. He looked as if he was half asleep. His legs and arms were outstretched in comfort. A still pool of blood lay next to him. It had fallen from his mouth and grown slowly in size. A mouth fountain of life lost.

I did not want to see him. I was little and it upset my world. I would have chosen to look away. I would have chosen not to know that he could not travel in the ambulance that first arrived. I would have chosen not to know his ambulance arrived much later, an ambulance that looked like an old aunty of the one that had been there before. He died. My mom told me that he was OK, but I knew he was dead. Why had that first ambulance not taken him? Why? Where did we find the hatred to leave a man that was so close to death?

Exert from "Things of my place"