This world cup is inviting reminisces about primary school. Why? I keep seeing the surnames of friends from primary school in the names of football players from around the world. Yet, we were led to believe our shire was the least ethnically diverse in all of Australia. The Sutherland Shire, also called “The Shire” and “The Insular Peninsula”. It sits on a finger of land jutting out between two waterways and was the place where Captain Cook first set anchor and the British began the systematic decimation of Australia’s indigenous people, but that’s a story for lots of other posts, probably not at this blog.

Anyway, I hadn’t thought about the names from school since I was 10. And when I was 10 I wasn’t thinking about where those names came from. They were just my class mates.

But these past few weeks I’ve wondered if we were somewhat misled about the ethnic diversity around home back then in the early 80s.

I wondered if my primary school friend with the name Jacobson hailed from Denmark–if my visual memory serves me right, she may well have. And then I remembered Filetti, who it never occurred to me may have been from anywhere other than surf-obsessed, southern Sydney. And then I remembered a friend with the name Baranenko who it never occurred to me may have hailed from Eastern Europe. It never occurred to me that another friend Kokinos was Greek. There was also the Racheds…

And then I remembered my friend Mr Ajam from South Africa whose family hailed from the Indian sub-continent before South Africa and a story he told me when we got to high school.

In high school he told me that, when we were in primary school, I’d called him all sorts of racist names. I really thought he was joking. I couldn’t remember calling him names at all. But he insisted I had. It must have taken him a lot of courage to say something after all those years. It obviously hurt him or he wouldn’t have felt the need to talk about it nine years later. He left me wondering. I knew he wasn’t the kind of person to tell stories or lie, but I could not recall ever calling him names. And it worried me that I couldn’t remember.

This exchange sat in my sub-conscious while I got on with passing exams. And then one day I suddenly remembered. I was doing something else entirely when I remembered an incident from primary school. I had been standing in canteen line and had called him names—I couldn’t remember what names, but I could remember doing it. And I couldn’t believe I had done it.

He was right. I had been that person as a child. I found him and apologized. I couldn’t believe I had done that to someone and how it had hurt him. I was “unaware,” as they say.

I hope my children are not going to be teased like I once teased my friend. But I also hope they grow up with the courage to say something if they are, like my friend once mustered the courage to speak up to me. And I hope they grow up with as much humility and compassion as my friend once displayed too.

When the names from primary school started popping up during the South Africa tournament, bringing their own flood of long-forgotten memories, I thought of my friend that I’d horribly teased and wondered what he thinks of the South Africa holding the World Cup today—he came to Australia around 1980.

And I wonder what he would think of me ending up in West Africa married to an African.

To South Africa and all my primary school friends: If you watch the World Cup in South Africa long enough you will see yourselves all over the world.