Schoolkids point the way
‘‘You can walk with us.’’ A tiny event in the scheme of things but it made a large impression this week: my partner, an Aussie who’s been here 15 or so years, was looking for the mosque in Ponsonby. She came by a group of schoolkids, all with flowers and overheard them chattering about where they were taking their tributes. She asked for directions.
‘‘You can walk with us.’’
At the country’s oldest mosque, Al-Masjid Al-Jamie, there were homemade cinnamon doughnuts and muffins – like any typical Kiwi bake sale, only handed out for free – on a trestle table and a couple of women there to welcome the locals and explain the comings and goings of a place of worship many of us had probably walked past a thousand times and never knew was there.
The schoolkids took selfies. Left flowers. Helped themselves to the pastries. Learnt a little about Islam.
My partner’s father converted to Islam a couple of decades ago when he married into a family in Indonesia. He’s a gruff Dutch guy from Mandurah in West Australia. And this week we learnt that he and his wife knew someone injured in last week’s attacks on the Christchurch mosques.
A friend from Jakarta had been ‘‘grazed by a bullet’’. They were all quite shaken.
The prime minister last week told us that ‘‘terrorism has no borders’’ – but equally, neither do the interwoven connections of individuals affected by such a heinous event.
And the more we understand these links, the more the stories are told of the relatives of the injured, the affected and the dead, the more we should understand that all those artificial barriers we create in society – of age, of language, of belief, of geography – simply don’t matter.
An 85-year-old Aussie with an unmistakable Dutch drawl and his Indonesian wife; the six generations of Ismail Ahmed Bhikoo’s family (who we write about on this page) who’ve been Kiwis for more than a century; the widows of those who died on March 15 (who we talk to on page 4); the women who baked those cinnamon doughnuts – please listen to this country’s youngsters.
‘‘You can walk with us’’.