I’ve been invited to a party this Saturday night and two of my regular babysitters cannot look after JJ for me. Last night all I could think about was who could I get to babysit. Who haven’t I asked for a little while and who might be prepared to do it? It felt a bit like the world might end if I don’t get a babysitter on Saturday night. There might be a lovely man at this party that I will never meet if I don’t go.
Today, things were put into perspective for me for a couple of reasons.
I went to an Indigenous cultural awareness workshop/seminar today which was about gaining an understanding of our indigenous culture which we are not taught in school. When I went to school and learnt about Australian history we were taught about white settlers but not much about the Australian Aboriginals was mentioned. The talk today put that in perspective and it was really well run in that we pretended to be the displaced Aboriginals while the workshop presenter was white man so we could try and see things from the Aboriginals’ point of view. We also learnt about how their traditional culture works – well as much as we could absorb in a day anyway.
At a lunchtime walk I talked to the two colleagues that I used to work in the same area with and we discussed a fellow colleague who is very ill from cancer at the moment. She’s undergoing chemotherapy and the prognosis does not sound very good.
Both these things made me realise that while I would love to go the party on Saturday and I will make the effort to get babysitting, I am really lucky that I don’t encounter racism on a daily basis and that I am healthy.
