We did some dance workshops at schools this week. I absolutely love working with young children. I know I'm going to be a primary school teacher one day. Just not now yet. But children can be ruthless also. There was this one group of 10 year olds. The group was far too big for the dancers actually, and their teacher wasn't helping one bit. There were 2 dancers. One of them is a tiny, supersweet Italian girl. She doesn't speak Dutch, but she was there anyway to help out. Just before this workshop she was telling me how happy she was to be joining this project. She didn't like being pushed around as a dancer. Sometimes she felt like a doll and these teachers and choreographers would pull her limbs and she would stand up straight and try to perfect her technique but it served nothing. In this project she felt liberated and she had fun.
And so during this workshop there was a group of mean little boys. They were standing in the back corner with their arms crossed making fun of all the other children who were trying to follow the Dutch dancer in front of the group. My Italian girl was standing somewhere in the middle between the other kids, showing them the movements, helping them out with a smile on her face. But she noticed the mean boys also and it was bugging her. And she couldn't communicate with them because of the language problem. So instead she tried to reach out to them as she did with the other children. With a big generous smile on her face she did a little dance as to encourage the boys to follow. And then this one boy did this: he copied her dance with a big mocking expression on his face. And when he finished the other boys would burst into laughter. She flinched. And staring blankly into space she continued her work.
So what about these boys? Are they really mean-spirited? Are these the boys that grow up to be mean bankers who steal from poor innocent people? Can they still change into funloving carefree human beings? I don't know. I remember doing some mean stuff when I was little too. I wasn't exactly a bully, but it wouldn't be fair to say that I never bullied anyone during my childhood. There was this new boy in my class when I was 13. He fled from Iran being a Christian. He was weirdlooking and smelly and strange to me. We would make fun of him. I feel so ashamed remembering that. It must have been so hard on this poor boy. It's an evil mix of fear of what doesn't match your standards and peer pressure.
There's even a worse story actually than this one. In my primary school there was a boy who didn't match our standards either. He had such white skin and a shreeky voice and he would cry and get angry over the smallest things. We was bullied heavily by almost the entire school. A long time ago, but long after primary school, his mother met my mother in the supermarket. She told my mom that he was such an unhappy boy still and that life was so hard on him. And she told my mother that I stood up for him sometimes in school and she was grateful for that. A few years ago he committed suicide. Alone. In the forest. With a knife. And as hard as I try, I can't recollect any memories of standing up for him. I just remember making fun of him.
