Three Cheers for Nice White People!

My skin color has been both a blessing and a bane to me in the past 20 years of my life, spent mostly among those much more colorful than I. Typically, people draw back a bit, either just because white people are different or sometimes they have a preconception due to white stereotypes from the remaining vestiges of colonialism. (I had a 60 year old villager give me a ‘cut your throat’ gesture once in North Vietnam. I didn’t have to ask what that was about and really didn’t blame him.) I hate it when someone starts a sentence with… “all white people are…” (unless the next word is simply “white”). In the Philippines kids call out a friendly “Hey Joe!” In Myanmar they may walk beside you staring wildly step by step along the path because they have been kept so isolated from the outside world. Sometimes being white here makes things easier. Sometimes it creates a barrier I can’t easily get beyond. It all depends upon the people I am meeting. The biggest response here in Thailand is simply shyness.

That’s why it was amazing to me when this perky 14 year old girl plopped down beside me and Sherry to eat her meal in the secret employees cafeteria at the sparkling Bangkok airport. I loved her immediately. Such courage. There were a hundred other tables but she chose to come sit next to me though our table was taken. Then the thought occurred to me. “She’s had a very positive experience with white people somehow.” In a strange room we were the “safe zone.” So we chatted with her in simple English. She was from Cambodia and with a group of kids about to go to Germany. We spied another foreigner at a table far behind us, keeping a relaxed watch over his flock of 25 scattered cambodian kids, all wearing American t-shirt designs. He worked with a non-profit that had arranged a tour of Germany for these kids to perform over the next 6 weeks. This was day one on the road. I felt so good about his group’s contribution to this child’s life and was grateful for the impression he had left in her mind that ‘our kind of people’ were concerned about her welfare. I hope nothing in her future ever dims that notion.

So here’s to the vast majority of caucasians scattered around this big, wide, world who are non-bigoted, non-pedophilic, non-colonialist and doing good for other people. Thanks for making our job here just a little bit easier.