Leaving Small Towns

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Going to college/university in another country or outside your own state or province is part of education I guess. It’s one thing to learn about the United States of America in school. It’s another thing to attend a radio class in a Journalism School in New York with students who were born and raised in Georgia.

“The South! Aren’t you scared of lynching? Oh! My God!”

Sounds familiar. We all have pre-conceived ideas about certain parts of the world. Some of my classmates went back to Georgia after graduation. Others left Georgia because of promotion to vibrant markets like New York and Chicago.

SMALL TOWNS AND VILLAGES

There are villages in Africa. I don’t know what small towns are called in other parts of the world, but they are the primary reason why some professionals leave, never to return. Hey! They don’t have to be professionals. Maybe they left with the circus or intentionally married a travelling insurance salesman. How do I know? We leave small towns because of eyes, too many pairs of eyes watching us. You can’t talk to someone outside the magistrate’s court without somebody seeing you and relaying the news to your grandmother. By the time you reach home, she is worried sick. You can’t go to the hospital in the morning for a routine check-up, without people whispering behind your back, four hours later. “Are you O.K.? You look thin.”

We don’t want to admit it, but we tend to appreciate small towns when we think about our $5 million condos as big as grandma’s living room, the front porch and kitchen combined. We miss the no-reason-BBQ, the tomato plant that dies in winter and resurrects in the summer to produce tomatoes as big as my lips. We miss the importance when mothers embarrass their kids: This is the doctor that brought you into this world. There's also a nice ring to it when someone declares: “I play golf with the Mayor.”

Mayor. That’s the problem right there. It has politics written all over it, and it’s one of the reasons why some people leave Georgia, Arizona, Florida, South Carolina, Wisconsin and South Africa, and don’t look back.

Nonqaba waka Msimang

Blogger Without Borders

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