While walking back to the car from a long day at the Reno Air Races on Friday last, Ron, Natacha (our African ‘daughter’ and student who lives with us ) and I were remarking, a bit snidely, about the get-ups we had seen on some of the air race attendees. You know what I’m talking about: pants hanging down to ‘there’, tattoos, butt cracks on fat women, multiple piercings and the like.
Natacha started to defend the ‘choices’ that young people make. She’s 33 years old now, and in that ‘tween universe of no longer a kid but not a cranky- remember- when middle-ager either. So I asked her, “Well, how would you feel if that were your daughter with the red, yellow and blue hair, nose ring, tongue stud and a tattoo across her bottom that says ‘bite me’ ?”
Ron and I were fairly startled when she said “I’d slap her!”
I responded with “child abuser!” Ron had a bemused grin on his face, waiting for the rest of it.
“I’d slap her and send her back to Africa!”
Natacha basically has zero tolerance for people who live in the worlds’ richest country and cruise around looking like either extremely low examples of what we used to call ‘carnie workers’ or fat beached whales. It’s a real eye opener, and definitely gets you to reframe your thinking when she responds so strongly about something we’ve all tried real hard to just accept in order to keep our more mature heads from exploding.
She had gone around the air races all day long grabbing my elbow and saying something like “look … look at that man and his stomach.” You have to hear it in the original heavily French accented English to really appreciate it. She kept trying say look at his belly, but I kept hearing ‘bally’ and was getting horribly confused. Maybe it was the heat and Jet-A fuel vapors in the air.
You have to know that Natacha won’t even allow me to photograph her without having one of her ‘weegs’ on, since seeing her in her short cropped ‘natural’ isn’t considered very classy over there…. sort of like going around in your underwear. She’s neat and clean as a shiny new penny, and dresses with more French chic than I could ever muster, even if I could ever be that slender. Natacha can wear Target and look like it was Chanel.
I also got a lecture on how rude it is, in Africa, to call somebody over to you and use the gesture of crooking your index finger. Nice people don’t use that gesture.
But think of it. This could be a gold mine of an opportunity. People could send us their messed up, entitled little darlings and we could ship them off to Congo, where they can sit and try to figure out why people with so very little try their best to look decent. Maybe looking well groomed and like you care is a lot when you know that you don’t have much control over anything else in your life.
I think $10k per kid would be a place to start. I’ll bet they’d come back with a different attitude after a month in Pointe Noir, Congo.
maven
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 21:07 
