In the eye of the beholder

Someone said to me last week that the Aboriginal people in Australia did not get recognition. I said they did not get acknowledgement. In Afrikaans the words herken (recognize) and erken (acknowledge)are used interchangeably - even though it is fundamentally wrong because you are dealing with two different actions. Which leads me to my next point: a friend living in Melbourne works with an atheist. Someone that I have issues with -an atheist. By name I have to wonder: how can you deny the existence of a higher being if you have not acknowledged the existence in the first place? Surely agnostic would be a better description in this case? Because that is just all-round denial and nothing more.

In NZ I met a woman during my rounds of the sandwich set (i.e. departmental or agency meetings and lounging about with other bureaucrats), who was bisexual. I know it because she told me so. When we first met at one of these think tank exercises, she offered me her hand and her first words to me were: I am X. I am bisexual.(of course she had a real name, but that is not important here now). How on earth do you respond to that? It struck me that she wanted to be recognized and acknowledged all in one, i.e. this is what you can call me and this is what I prefer. She might as well have added: Don't you judge me! like Joyce from the tv series "My name is Earl".

This week I went to a conference. All about ethnicity and diversity and old people (since this is the world I work in at the moment). Stereotypes galore. The little olive-skinned Jewish lady with the big hair, the prim and proper German (they spoke one after the other - an irony not lost on me at all!) and the beautiful Greeks with their noses, hair and over-the-top makeup. As long as I stay silent and not utter a word, Aussies think I am one of them. As soon as I open my mouth and the clear vowels tumble out, I am labelled as something else. What that "something else" is, has changed over the years. I've been called everything from Scandinavian to Eastern European to Dutch to Indian (over the phone, that one). And the dear little darling at the Kiwi Immigration Department was checking out my qualifications at an university in Delhi. (She never told me which one, I should have asked. I could have been head of a call centre by now!) Unfortunately I had to burst her bubble.

To me it is important to be recognized by people I don't know or have just met for the first time (it can be extremely embarrassing if you have forgotten the hostess's/church leader's/teacher's name - easy for them, there is only one of me). It is even more important for me to be acknowledged. Especially by my peers. Not only do they enrich my pool of knowledge by doing so, but together we set new standards in our work, our friendships, our stories. Acknowledgement is cementing good practice, good behaviour and it puts bad habits out in the open and shines the light on it. That way you can deal with stuff.

My Dad was a primary school principal. Namaqualand is not very densely populated and nearly every person knew him. And he knew them. It was a nightmare going into town with him. Half of the time spent there would be taken up by meeting and greeting other people. General chit-chat (now I know it is networking). I always hoped I would never grow up knowing a million people. Of course I did not, I chose a career that led me on thousands of kilometres of dust road, gravel road, asphalt road and cyber miles. The list of the people I know now, have worked with, counted as friends, have met, workshopped with, played with, loved and cried with will rival anything my Dad could put together in all his years. But,now I am wise enough to recognize it as the aknowledgement that it is.