"Nomvula, you look nice today...

...you must have looked in a mirror this morning"
~One of my teachers. (This may or may not have been far less insulting if said in swati...I think).

Here is a list of things I don’t miss from the US:
*Smog
*WalMart
*Arbys
*Driving through LA at 5pm on a weekday
*Having an action star for a Governor
*The persistent, nagging feeling that eventually I would have to find something to do with my life.

Here is a list of things in South Africa that make me think of home:
*My sister lying on a mat in the shade and chatting with her best friend
*The weird steel cans coke uses here instead of aluminum
*The mall in Nelspruit
*The flashing clock in a taxi that looks just like the one in my mom’s car
*The way the busses all pull out of the station together, and the drivers flash thumbs up and jocky for position…I used to do that, too.

Its strange, and you hear it a lot, but it really is the little things in life that grab you in an immediate and abrupt way. The busses and the drivers in Malelane make me think of Davis and of Unitrans so much. The way we were almost playing games with our 40 foot, 10 ton toys, the way they do it too. It makes me smile on a few levels – at the memory, at the sense of kinship, at the knowledge that of all the people on the bus they would never suspect that I’m the one who ‘gets it.’ The way my teachers joke around in the staff room brings me back to the time I spent subbing, and the times when I got the in-jokes, too.

Here I am the perpetual outsider, by my skin color of course, but also by my language, my clothes, by my expectations of friends and family, even my very thought processes are strange and different -- untaught. I hear young men walk down the street in front of my house at dusk. They’re laughing, and talking, yelling at each other. Its probably closer to a stumble than a walk, if I wanted to get close enough to examine it. How many times have I done the same march home, surrounded by my friends? How many times have I roamed a neighborhood at an hour when ‘respectable’ people were in bed and becoming severely irritated by whatever those damn university hooligans were up to? I want to smile as the men walk by my house, but instead I melt back behind the door, hoping that they don’t see me. I’ve been there, yes, they should not be so alien, so frightening to me, but…they are. How many little old ladies do you think we frightened on our midnight walks? How many people felt like the outsider because of something I said or did? Who always felt like they were on the margins, unable to quite fight their way through that invisible boundary of voice and thought and color?

Its me now, trapped by the little things.