I had a rather illuminating conversation with my friends’ 4 year old daughter on Sunday morning. She’s been learning about Africa at school. She had been telling me a few things throughout last week that she had learned, and asked lots of very intelligent questions (as she often does) that made me think back to conversations with my Nigerian roommate, Ruky.

“What do African children wear?“

Well, my Compassion child in Ethiopia and all the children I met in South Africa wear clothes similar to the ones you and I wore as children.

I showed her pictures of South Africa and what we had been doing – visiting the water park, team building exercises on the beach, holiday club and painting in the school.

“The children in Africa have to write on the walls at school” she said to me. “They don’t have paper to write on“.

Now I’m sure in the vast continent of Africa that’s true of some schools. But not all of them. I also remember at my own school in Scotland there was a period where we had no jotters to write on because the school had no money to buy them.

I had been watching this clip from Kamsin’s blog the night before. It was very like the conversations me and Ruky had many times in the safety of our room after long day on project. We were shocked by some of our teammates responses to what we saw in South Africa.

Like the day all the kids were drawing pictures.

“Isn’t it a shame that all they draw is houses” one teammate said to Ruky.

Why is that a shame? You know, I grew up as a white skinned, blonde haired, blue eyed girl in rich educated Britain where apparently the streets are paved with gold. You know what I drew when I was the same age? Houses. Usually with a sun at the top left hand corner and maybe some grass or flowers.

Is there poverty, catastrophe, war, famine, AIDS in Africa?

Yes.

Are there people who are not living in starvation, who go on to further education from their school that is not so different from the ones you or I went to?

Yes.

My friends in South Africa who had grown up in some of the townships were shocked when I told them that there were homeless people in the UK, people addicted to drugs and alcohol in the UK.

The single story goes both ways.

We have a lot to learn from Africa about family, about community, about creativity, about compassion, about parenting, about caring for others, about doing much with little.

I’m ashamed to say that I have been a victim of the single story, growing up hearing about the ‘poor, starving Africans’, I asked my friend a few years ago ‘Do they have supermarkets there?‘

He was suitably appalled by my ignorance.

Let’s not get sucked in to the single story, and remember there are many stories. My favourite one this week is of the football team made up of Gogos (grannies) in South Africa. World cup fever is so alive there just now!