Carol’s Column

Maya

I am watching my tiny granddaughter Maya who has come from afar to spend the millennium with us, her grandparents in Africa.

A miniature person, she is exactly one year old. Her toe-drop edged feet are pudgy, as is the rest of her soft little body. Her black-lashed eyes are deep blue, her curls shades of dark brown to gold.

She walks with her plump legs wide apart for balance and her arms stretched outwards. She constantly giggles with joy for the small world around her is always happy. In her short life she is well-loved and content. Her meal times are journeys of colour, taste and texture, her waking hours explorations of things to learn, see, touch and do. She trusts everyone, as she has not yet learnt otherwise.

Maya has not heard of past centuries' histories of wars and atrocities, of the ugliness of genocide, of the evils of racial hatred or religious intolerance. She has never experienced inhumanity or want. She doesn't know that vultures and rats gnaw at children dying of starvation in countries such as Rwanda and India. That here in South Africa more children than is imaginable are hungry and homeless, that millions are dying of aids before they reach the age she is today.

She lies in a round yellow and green blow-up plastic pool, the sun bouncing off her bottom as she splashes on her belly, her feet kicking furiously, dipping her face into the four centimetres of water and blowing noisy bubbles. She is distracted as a mynah cheekily squawks, a pigeon scavenges pieces of chewed up biscuit she's discarded and a lizard shoots across the lawn.

Maya doesn't know that in Africa lizards, termite grubs and mopane worms are regarded as delicacies or that in China people delight in deep-frying the succulent hind quarters of dogs and cats. Beside her, the family dog wags her tail equally unaware that in some parts of the world, she is good enough to eat.

We have fitted plug guards on all electric outlets and when she wanders too near the hot stove, we screech her away in unison because she has still to learn that fire burns. Hopefully she will never learn that so does napalm and mustard gas.

In the sweetest little way, Maya dismantles and pulls apart everything she possibly can. A box of tissues, the contents of a handbag, a pair of sunglasses. She is insatiably curious about how things work, the essence of things. In a minuscule way this is the precursor to splitting the atom, to the advance and harnessing of nuclear energy, the destructive insanity of the atom and hydrogen bomb.

Her vocabulary is limited to meaningless sounds other than "mama" and "dada" but without language she makes her needs entirely known with gestures and actions, smiles and cries. She is able to communicate with everyone she meets just by crinkling her nose and bestowing her eight-toothed grin.

Today, Maya is an innocent little person, unspoilt, pure and untouched by sadness or deprivation.

I wish for her and for every other child and adult in the world that this new millennium will herald in only good things, things of which we can be proud. And above all, I hope that for my granddaughter and everyone else, the next hundred years will be a glorious adventure.

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