Teaching the affluent

Last week I taught creative writing to fifth through eight graders at a Catholic girls’ school in one of the wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg. I can hardly condemn their isolation when I myself graduated from Tudor Hall School for Girls in Indianapolis. Saint Brescia’s has a lovely campus with lawns and gardens watered by an automatic sprinkling system. The girls stood politely and recited their welcome and their thanks to me in unison. Their green blazers and straw hats reminded me of old sepia photographs of Cambridge and Oxford University students a hundred years ago. Most, but not all, were white. It was hard to imagine that they lived in the same city as the kids in Tembisa or at Saint Francis. As far as their experience goes, the girls of Saint Brescia’s are as far from Tembisa as the children of Indianapolis, even though I could drive the distance in forty-five minutes. (Make that an hour and a half in Johannesburg rush hour.)

We had a fun time talking about showing the setting and characters instead of telling the reader about them. The teachers were enthusiastic. The girls eagerly bought autographed copies of The Wooden Ox. The war in Mozambique in the 1980s is as distant to them as the Holocaust was to me at their age.

At the end of two days I spoke at a dinner meeting of librarians and English teachers from similar schools. “How can we get children from affluent white homes to be concerned about the problem of HIV?” one asked. (“How can we get affluent Americans to be concerned?” I wanted to ask in return.) Story is the best answer I have to offer, short of coming here and meeting people personally—something affluent suburban South African whites are often terrified to do. Whether it is accounts of real people or fictionalized representations of what real people go through, stories show readers that the people they have read about or seen on the TV news are more than statistics. Their pain doesn’t go away when the TV camera is turned off. Their hopes for the future, their dreams of love and hunger to be valued are similar to the reader’s hopes and dreams. What does the boy whose face lit up when I read Just Me and My Brother in a dirt yard at Arebaokeng have in common with a girl in a crisp uniform or with a child riding the school bus in Webster, Wisconsin? They are all made in the image of God. When one part of the body hurts, the whole body hurts. The question for me is, how can I use story to show that reality to all three children?