Dancing with strangers

SUMMARY
`DANCING WITH STRANGERS´
BY Mª CARMEN CUENCA GARCÍA


1st story: EKATERINA

A South African man is coming back home from another country. His flight stops in Athens and he thinks it’s a beautiful place to stay because of its ancient culture. In the airport he meets a poor young Greek girl who is going to fly with him. She’s very sad and seems helpless. They sit together in the plane and she starts speaking in Greek. He doesn’t understand her but looking at her eyes and her face, he can imagine what’s she’s trying to say. She’s engaged to a rich Greek man who lives in Johannesburg but they haven’t met yet. The South African man tries to say to her that she should think about coming back home and living her own life but she says she can’t. When they arrive to South Africa she meets her engaged man. He’s an old fat man but she decides to get married to him because it’s her duty.


2nd story: BREAKING LOOSE

An African man and an Indian girl meet in a pub in her home town in Africa. She’s with her friends and it means that she mustn’t dance with a stranger but she does. He’s a professor at the university where she’s studying Literature. They start a forbidden relationship against her mother’s will: he’s not Asian and he’s older than her. His father is more open-minded and let her continue seeing him…but he dies and she has to be strong and determined to break away from family, friends, old customs and old ways.


3rd story: REMEMBER ATITA

Atita is a young African girl who comes back to her home town to try to find her friends. She always says they were as in that old song ´Five green bottles standing on the wall’ because she’s got a photo in which they are sitting on a wall, smiling at the camera when they were little girls. While she’s looking for them, she meets a boy who sleeps in the streets since his family fear for his life because military men kill people in their homes at night. Atita sleeps next to him on the floor of the shop veranda every night. After some days looking for her friends she finds one of them. She’s at the hospital and she doesn’t recognize Atita. She can’t talk but Atita visits her every day. Some weeks later Laker can remember at last and tells her about one of their friends. Laker saw some soldiers shooting her and that’s the reason she couldn’t talk anymore. But now Atita is near and she´ll be happy again.


4th story: A GATHERING OF BALD MEN

A man who sells insurances to old black people looks at himself one day and notices he´s got a bald patch on his head. He’s very worried and gets nervous. His wife doesn’t make light of that but then she remembers some men who kill themselves for that reason. He goes to work but instead of this he enters in an old pub and drinks a lot. A man comes in and tells him he knows about his thoughts. He’s got the solution: he´ll help him to kill himself. He says he’s blind but he’s going to drive his car. He does it and the police stop them. They know this crazy man-who is not blind- and decide to let them go. The new friends open an agency where they work telling people that to be a bald man is not a misfortune and they get lots of money.