Sandwich

To watch Salma and Lily, one from Jordan and another from the United States, play at school is to witness children's friendship in action.

These two girls appear in the fascinating story book The Sandwich Swap. (There's even a YouTube version with the same title of the book.) They're close to each other like a pair of gloves. Or at least sort of. They spent a lot of time together at school, played on the swings together, drew pictures together, jumped ropes together, ate their lunches together. In many ways, they are pretty alike, except the color of hair: Salma's is black and Lily's blonde.

Nobody could have predicted the day when Salma and Lily shouted at each other.

Why did they shout?

The weird sandwich.

This is their cultural conflict - what to think of the foreign (Middle East) hummus and pita, and what to keep for herself (peanut butter and jelly sandwich). Treading that line, keeping one's culture in mind, and accepting other's cookery, is what we call tolerance. And it isn't a trait we're born with. Lily didn't have the heart (or the stomach) to accept her friend's hummus sandwich.

"Your sandwich looks kind of yucky,"

It could have been Lily's slip of the tongue, but seemed to be bad enough to set up a tsunami of dirty words. Ewwww, yuck, gross, garlic breath, bad smell, weird, you name it - the surefire ways to start World War III. At the height of the War, the two girls made rude insults that had nothing to do with peanut butter or hummus. They just yelled. In effect, it insults, it intrudes, it intimidates. The insults can hurt, and are shockingly mean.

Although I was unaware of it when I borrowed this book from the public library, my daughter had just made the same mistake as Lily. I then told her the story of curse words that hurt the best friend.

She promised she would not do it again, and I tried not to think about the last time I promised this myself.