Schoolbag Sherpas
My 11-year-old daughter is in Year Eight and weighs about 32kg. Her schoolbag is new this year and on Monday morning, it seemed to weigh a tonne. 'You need a suitcase!' I said, not laughing, as I ran to get my camera - and the scales. She was running late, which is normal for a Monday, but she smiled as she tried to stuff a thick library book into the bag.
My daughters and I, and Aunty E, who helps me raise my children, crowded around the scale to see an astounding 10.2kg start to flash. That's a heavy bag. Aunty E's first point of business for the week is to carry my daughter's schoolbag down the 198 steps to the bus stop, and I sometimes wonder if I am guilty of illegal deployment.
Had it been Wednesday, the schoolbag would have been even heavier, holding her gym clothes. Had it been Tuesday, she would have had to carry it along with her guitar case. On Fridays, she goes straight to golf squad and so she needs her clubs. (They weigh only 4.8kg.)
Being a Hongkonger, I am familiar with the issue of heavy schoolbags and their effect on the spines of the young, especially on those with petite frames. So, on Tuesdays, I get on the school bus with my children, saddled with my own kit bag, my yoga mat, 10kg schoolbag and guitar case.
My younger daughter, of sturdier build, carries her own schoolbag, but as she's only in Year Five, it is significantly lighter, for now. On Tuesdays, I stay on the bus and get off one stop beyond the school.
I sit in a coffee shop for an hour before trudging to my weekly yoga class. I get weight training from carrying the schoolbags. Aunty E gets more exercise every Friday afternoon when she takes my daughter's golf bag to school on her bicycle, and returns with the 10.2kg schoolbag. She is trying to make it up the hill to our place without getting off and walking the bike up. It hasn't happened yet, but she's making progress. I said when she can do this I will sponsor her in the extreme sporting competition of her choice.
Mums and aunties know that part of the job involves being a mule - or, from an Asian perspective, a Sherpa, which sounds much more respectable. After all, where would Sir Edmund Hillary have been without Tenzing Norgay?
Sherpa Tenzing was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Not only did he help other people achieve their goals (I am thinking of Hillary and countless other mountain climbers), but he was also able to achieve his own ambitions and help the community of mountain climbers/porters and his fellow Sherpa people.
To admirably do one's job to help others succeed, to fulfil one's own ambitions, and to contribute to one's community - now, that sounds like a life lived well! I think about this, especially every Tuesday morning, and I don't feel so bad.
In Wikipedia, in a quote from James Ramsey Ullman's book Tiger of the Snows, Sherpa Tenzing says: 'It has been a long road ... from a mountain coolie, a bearer of loads, to a wearer of a coat with rows of medals who is carried about in planes and worries about income tax.' I don't know about medals, but the thanks from my children, and their uncompromised little spines, are reward enough for me.
Karmel Schreyer is a writer and mother of two children
