Here’s a glimpse of what seemed to be a rehearsed comedy Neil and I starred in last week.
Scene 1:
Waiter: “You would like a hamburger. So ham for you (points at Neil), cheese for you (points at me).”
Us: “No, a hamburger. With beef in the middle, cheese, tomato, and lettuce on the top, and bread on both sides.” (Hamburgers are on the menu).
Waiter: “Oh yes.” And he walks away confidently.
Scene 2:
The waiter comes back with ketchup and vinegar in a silver serving bowl on a silver platter, and two ham and cheese sandwiches with tomato and lettuce sprigs toothpicked on top.
We both really wanted hamburgers.
Waiter: “Is this okay?”
Neil: “No this is not okay. Can we talk to the cook?”
The cook comes out and we explain to her that we wanted a hamburger.
Cook: “Oh yes, a hamburger. Of course.”
Awkward silence.
Neil: “We would like a hamburger.” Finally the cook takes back the ham and cheese sandwiches. The customer is not always right in Africa!
Liz: “We would like TWO hamburgers. One for me, one for him.”
Cook: Okay.
Scene 3:
The waiter comes back with ONE hamburger. We laugh. What else can we do?
Neil: “We would like another hamburger.”
Waiter: “Okay”.
And that’s where the story finally ends happily. It took awhile, but we both got hamburgers! Whew. Stories like this always amaze me because it gives me a little more of a glimpse into how different Africans think, and how little they understand America. Few Swazis know what a hamburger is, and most live on pap and beans everyday. They try so hard to give us what they think is American (silver platter & bowl), that is over-the-top nice, not understanding that in America we actually eat ketchup out of small, flimsy paper bowls.
Communicating with Swazis requires much grace from us and from them. I am sure we do many things they think are absolutely crazy. They think peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are a disgusting idea and don’t understand how we can eat them. And they probably got a pretty good kick out of watching our entire team chase one rooster around our homestead so that our gogo (grandma) could cook him for dinner. It took 16 Americans but only takes one Swazi! And as you can see from the hamburger story, Africans will normally agree with you even if they don’t understand or even don’t agree. That makes for interesting communication. I usually think they understand much more of what I am saying than they actually do.
People (women espcially) are strong here and I always feel very weak compared to them. How do women walk down the street with a full cooler on their head and a baby on their back? I’m sure if I did that the cooler would fall off my head and kill the baby. But they are confident and I’ve never seen them drop anything. More than anything I wish I could bend over the way the women do – their backs simply bend in a different way than any Americans’ back I have seen. Instead of curving, it lies flat, and they can work all day in that position.
These are just a few of the cultural things I think about!
