Back in Southeast Asia, I picked up a popular saying: Same Same, but Different. Basically, you use it when two items are pretty similar in nature (like a particular style of pants), but still different in other aspects (like the color).
Now that I’m in South Africa, I encounter cases like these daily. It’s like different seasons in my past show up in such a familiar way that I feel like I’ve gone back in time. Then I have to remind myself, I’m living a unique experience in a country, in a continent, I hadn’t stepped foot in until 3 weeks ago. It’s “same same, but different.”
The Same: Spending the afternoon driving around a national park, looking at wildlife.
The Different: Instead of deer, bears, and raccoons, wildlife here consists of lions, elephants, giraffes, zebras, etc.
The Same: After a year of endless summer, the weather now feels like the start of a perfect Fall season.
The Different: We are living in the Southern Hemisphere so technically it’s Spring. Instead of winter coats on the shelves, they are selling shorts and flip flops. The endless summer continues…
The Same: We took the long way home one day and drove through a subdivision with big, beautiful homes.
The Different: The homes here went for approximately $200,000-$300,000. Same house in the USA would easily go for $1 million – $1.5 million.
The Same: We do our grocery shopping at a store called Spar, he same store I used to go to all the time.
The Different: When I shopped at Spar, I lived in Vienna, Austria. Different country, different continent.
The Same: Our friends here speak Afrikaans, which is very similar to Dutch. Everyday, it reminds me of my semester I spent studying with Dutch students in Germany, which is right next to The Netherlands.
The Different: Based on my elementary understanding, Afrikaans is to Dutch what Italian is to Spanish. Not exactly the same, but if each party speaks slowly, they can understand each other for the most part.
The Same: The highways we ride on here are comparable to our interstates in the USA.
The Different: The country is divided into provinces, not states. Oh! And here they drive on the left side of the road, not the right.
The Same: Imagine a random day in October, where a group gets in the bed of a vehicle and rides around a farm or field.
The Different: In the past, that experience for me would be likened to a hayride in the back of a pickup truck. Here, it was a group of us standing in the back of a “bukkie”, subtract the hay, and add on panning for gold and the end of the ride.
I think a lot of times, it’s easy for us think of Africa as a country, not a continent. It’s like Europe in the respect that there are several, incredibly-diverse countries with there own languages, cultures, currencies, etc. However, Africa is much larger and even more diverse than Europe. “Same, same, but different.”
