Sometimes you find cross-cultural moments when you least expect them. My first graders are doing a slide show on the computer, and I’ve asked them to do pictures of their parents, their pets, their teacher, etc. Last week I asked them do draw the seasons.

Them: Which one is the cold one?
Me: What do you mean?
Them: Which season is the one that gets cold?
Me: Winter!
Them: Which one is the dry one?

Then it hits me: we have a wet season and a dry season. There is no real winter here, and no real change of seasons, and most of the first graders have lived here most of their lives, Winter is a foreign concept, and has led to some interesting pictures.

I have always disdained people from another culture who could not figure out American football in ten minutes. It’s so easy that the only explanation of confusion is moral character. I felt that way until yesterday.

I watched my first rugby game yesterday. The game made no sense to me at all. Someone next to me tried to explain it to me, and the more he talked the more confused I became. I kept trying to understand it in the context of football, so I got more and more lost.

The solution was to just give myself over to the brutality of the sport. When I did that, I could honestly say that although I didn’t quite get it, and some of it just looks like doggy piling, I enjoyed it. But it made me wish I could watch the Cubs play a double header, and I am sure that by the time we get home they will have sowed up the division race as they go on to win the World Series in four games and then began a dynasty that…

Sorry; got off the track there. I will have more grace for people who don’t get football and baseball, and I will work to understand rugby. But multi culturalism has its limits: there is no Wrigley Field in Africa.

The Economist magazine came out this week, and it was depressing to all of us here. The cover was : Africa- the hopeless continent. There are so many problems here, and it seems to get worse and worse; poverty, aids, corruption, tribalism: I could write for a week.

But the more I thought about it, the more I was grateful to be in a place where the intellectuals and the capitalists have given up. There is only one hope, and when Africa turns around, it won’t be the intellectuals and the capitalists who will get the credit

I gave a black Barbie to a little girl in a wheelchair this morning. She has casts on both feet, and she was so excited she clicked her casts together. She made the doll walk, and turned to me and said: `I will walk like her someday.’

So will Africa.

YP

PS. This is JT and Matthew demonstrating a Magna-Doodle at the hospital.