community

Every night at 5pm a group of about 25 boys of school age get together at the center where I am based. They play for a while and then do their homework. These boys play together, study together, if they are studying late, sometimes sleep together, sometimes eat together and if history is any guide, will remain friends long after they finish school. Some will go on to college, others to jobs straight out of high school, but almost all of them will complete their schooling, and all of them will avoid the perils of drug and alcohol addiction.

I visited a boy’s family yesterday. On the way there, my volunteer friend and I started walking down a very narrow street. It was paved with bricks an on one side was a sewer drain that carried out all the waste from each house. Each house shared at least two of its walls with another and was connected to the street by a small bridge over the sewer. Although there were no street lamps the houses all had electricity and the light from each house was bright enough to make it seem like morning. As we were walking and talking two boys who were playing on the corner started following us. Seeing them, another few boys started to follow, and then another few. My friend put his arm around one of them and whispered something in his ear. The boy then turned around and spread this little bit of juicy gossip, obviously about me, to the rest of the boys who then went from looking and following with mild curiosity to looking with wide eyes and amazement. They were too shy to talk to me straight away but in their whispering amongst themselves I swear the only thing I could understand was “Ricky Ponting…. Ricky Ponting … Ricky Ponting” repeated several times.

When we reached the house we wanted to visit, my friend and I stopped and our entourage stopped behind us. They looked disappointed. It was an anti climax. A large group of marching boys need to be marching for a purpose; a protest or a parade maybe. Their original purpose was gone, but I think there’s something innate within us that loves a good march, so they kept going, about twenty of them, now with a new leader, heading nowhere in particular, but loving the journey anyway.

My friend knew our hosts very well, in fact he also new just about every kid that we came across by name and also their family. Our hosts were the boy, his father, his sister and her friend. The boy, lets call him Ralph, also had another sister and a mother, and all five of them slept and lived and cooked and ate in a house that was about 4m X 4m. I told them that although in my country we all have much bigger houses and cars and T.V.’s I literally don’t know the names of all my neighbors, and unless we need to build a new fence or cut down a tree, we never talk. I told them that I envied the kind of community that they had, and that they were actually rich, because they had all these things that no amount of money could buy.