I really enjoyed reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The main protagonist has Asberger's Syndrome. He doesn't understand statements that aren't literal, he can't read feelings, he can't eat anything that is yellow or brown (I do identify with that part). He functions, in fact he is extremely bright, but in a very specific and inflexible way. He doesn't adapt well.
He needs structure and routine in order to cope with life, yet he finds his surroundings infinitely fascinating. Why would anyone go abroad on holiday, he asks, when there is a lifetime of things to discover just in this house?
He does have a point. I know people who have never left these shores, and many more who have never been further than the Brit-heavy resorts of Greece and Spain or the family- and pocket-friendly campsites of Brittany. I don't believe their lives, their feelings, are any less complex than mine. You can live your whole life in an English market town -- or indeed a village in the middle of Asian or African nowhere -- and still experience the full gamut of human emotion. I don't buy the simple life = simple people equation, never have.
But if you do that, you won't have a global perspective. You won't be able to place yourself - as an individual, as a woman or a man, as a white or a black person, a rich or a poor person - on as broad a canvas, as wide a scale, as you can if you do travel, or at least if you travel in order to better understand the world or improve your or your family's chances in it, rather than to get a tan, buy a T-shirt or have sex with a teenage girl.
If you don't want a global perspective, that's fine. Not everybody does. But I want to know where my clothes are made, where my coffee comes from, how the system that keeps so many people poor while others make millions actually works. I want to know where the hope is, where the world is getting better rather than worse. And I want to know exactly how lucky I am, how many blessings I need to count, and what I can do to make a difference.
With all this as a prelude, I am struggling to process my feelings about my trip to South Africa. I've been in poorer countries but never one so menaced by HIV and never one so menacing to women. There are some issues we have to tackle as a species, not as a nation, and I feel South Africa has them in sharp relief. Maybe Africa as a whole, I don't know, one week in one country doesn't tell you much. But it does tell you something.
Or does it? I shared my taxi to the airport with an American couple who had been in Africa for five weeks, travelling south from Victoria Falls to Cape Town. One of them said to our driver, as we drove past Langa, one of Cape Town's black townships, where (alongside some relatively affluent and lots of perfectly adequate housing) there are shacks lining the freeway: "So, these houses looks kinda interesting, what's going on here?". Later, the other said "We've seen a lot of condom ads -- do you guys have a HIV problem?"
Which goes to show, if you are a doofus, you can travel as far as you like and you won't learn shit. I have met some great citizens of the US of A, but on balance, I think I'd prefer it if they stayed home. Troops included, natch.
I also came back feeling that in the big scheme of things, what does it matter if I start smoking again, but I'm fighting that one.
joella
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