I have to share a story from a bus trip that Maiken and I took last weekend:
We were sitting on a bus heading from Arusha to Moshi, and seated next to us was a middle-aged man traveling by himself. Maiken and I were sort of spacing out, looking out the window and nodding off to sleep. As we pulled away from one of the bus stops, all of a sudden the bus ticket collector handed the man next to us a little boy that had been acquired at the last stop. The boy was maybe one and half years old, and definitely was not accompanied by any adult who knew him. He was such a cute little guy! As people got on and off the bus, the child just got handed to different adults to sit on their laps; if he got fussy, some woman nearby would take him and comfort him, and when he needed to nap, someone would offer their shoulder for him to lay on.
At some point, we must have approached the town that the bus driver knew he needed to be dropped off at...several of the adults onboard started discussing in Swahili who would be getting off at that stop with the child, and how would they pay for his ride? The woman who was holding him at that moment reached into the pocket of his little jeans and pulled out a bus fare that someone had stuffed in there...perfect! She paid the bus driver, and at the next stop she got off with him and, I hope, found whoever was there to pick him up.
These are the kinds of things that 1. could never happen in the US and 2. I will really miss about Africa!
It was really an unbelievable thing to watch happen. The little boy was so comfortable being passed around from person to person, and the adults seemed to take him on as their own child for the brief duration of the bus journey. Maiken and I talked about how in the US or any Western country, you could never put your baby on a bus with some bus fare in his pocket and just hope he got pushed out at the right stop! But that's how things seem to work here in Africa, with the whole village taking care of its children.
We were sitting on a bus heading from Arusha to Moshi, and seated next to us was a middle-aged man traveling by himself. Maiken and I were sort of spacing out, looking out the window and nodding off to sleep. As we pulled away from one of the bus stops, all of a sudden the bus ticket collector handed the man next to us a little boy that had been acquired at the last stop. The boy was maybe one and half years old, and definitely was not accompanied by any adult who knew him. He was such a cute little guy! As people got on and off the bus, the child just got handed to different adults to sit on their laps; if he got fussy, some woman nearby would take him and comfort him, and when he needed to nap, someone would offer their shoulder for him to lay on.
At some point, we must have approached the town that the bus driver knew he needed to be dropped off at...several of the adults onboard started discussing in Swahili who would be getting off at that stop with the child, and how would they pay for his ride? The woman who was holding him at that moment reached into the pocket of his little jeans and pulled out a bus fare that someone had stuffed in there...perfect! She paid the bus driver, and at the next stop she got off with him and, I hope, found whoever was there to pick him up.
These are the kinds of things that 1. could never happen in the US and 2. I will really miss about Africa!
It was really an unbelievable thing to watch happen. The little boy was so comfortable being passed around from person to person, and the adults seemed to take him on as their own child for the brief duration of the bus journey. Maiken and I talked about how in the US or any Western country, you could never put your baby on a bus with some bus fare in his pocket and just hope he got pushed out at the right stop! But that's how things seem to work here in Africa, with the whole village taking care of its children.
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