ABSTRACT
I do not clearly remember her name, but I do remember her story. Tamara (that may have been her name) was sitting next to me (Nadine) on a fl ight from Johannesburg to Atlanta several years ago. Traveling with her mother, 10-year-old Tamara had only returned to South Africa from the United States 2 days earlier. She and her mother had spent 6 weeks in the United States on holiday and then returned to South Africa; only to receive a call that Tamara’s grandfather was having emergency heart surgery, and they were to return immediately. Tamara was born in Canada of South African and Canadian parents, and had lived her short life in South Africa and the United States. Her parents had recently divorced, and her mother remarried to a Zimbabwean of British descent-adding potentially another two nations to the pile of passports and permanent resident visas in Tamara’s drawer. During the night, I talked frequently to Tamara and her mother, who upon learning I was an educator, expressed dismay that Tamara’s expensive private school in Cape Town required her to learn two local languages-Xhosa and Afrikaans-instead of the French, Spanish, or Chinese, which Tamara’s mother had concluded would be much more useful to her daughter’s future.
