Culture tremors
Going back to the UK for a couple of weeks after 15 months away (or three and a half years with a couple of brief trips back) I wouldn't say I had culture shock exactly, but there were certainly tremors. I thought it might be interesting to note down a few of them:
1. Cold & gloom: although I was expecting the cold mentally, it's a whole lot different to actually feel it! What I had totally forgotten was the gloom. Whole days going by without seeing the sun; with complete low level grey cloud cover. Here it's pretty rare to see a cloud at all, and when there are any they certainly don't take all day to burn off!
2. Rain: I can't say I'd forgotten rain exactly, but it was the type of rain that was a bit of a shock. Here, when we have rain (and we have had about half an hour's rain since February) it's sudden, heavy and leaves quickly. It is also generally warm enough to dance around in in the nod (generally only the kids do that :) ). The rain we experienced in the UK was light and continuous and cold. I guess you could say the rain in TZ is acute, but in the UK is chronic!
3. Racial integration: I guess this was one of the most surprising ones for me. It wasn't until I was back in the UK that I realised how actually racially integrated it really is. I don't doubt there are ghettos, and that there are clashes between some groups, but the bottom line is if I see someone in the UK of any race, I cannot automically tell where they fit in.
In Tanzania (or at least Dodoma) there are four pretty much distinct groups:
a) wazungu (white folk): uniformly well-educated and articulate. Generally speaking, in management or supervisory roles.
b) Wahindi (Asian Tanzanians): Tanzanians of Asian (mostly Indian) background. Run shops.
c) Well-off Tanzanians: self-explanatory. Nice clothes, nice cars, nice phones. Generally fat, in political office or entrepreneurs (higher echelons). Or in management or reasonably well-paid clerical jobs.
d) Poor Tanzanians: the majority. Subsist on what they can get day-to-day. Manual labourers, farmers or sellers-of-vegetables-by-the-side-of-the-road (the lucky ones). Or beggars.
Now this is again a generalisation - particularly there are degrees between c) and d). However, generally if I see a person here I can tell where he fits in, and can anticipate how he will behave.
In the UK however, it was actually quite a shock to see a white guy unloading a frozen foods truck under the supervision of a Turkish guy. It was quite unsettling to fund that I couldn't place people just by looking at them! I guess this is partly a symptom of...
4. Class: (I confess that initially I had this down as 'coarseness'). As mentioned above, the white population here - as well as being multinational - is pretty much all of a common class. i.e. middle-ish, with a smattering of well-to-do folk. This means that coming back to the UK and bumping into people of all classes is quite a shock to the system.
5. Youth: we took a bus into town at what turned out to be the end of the school day. It was a shock to find the bus flooded with hordes of loud-mouthed, 'uncoof youfs' in school uniform. I know for a fact that there are precisely 1 white teenager(s) in Dodoma, and he is a nice respectable middle-class home-educated American. As far as I have seen, there is no such thing as a Tanzanian teenager (at least in the worst sense of the word). Certainly none that would climb on a bus shouting and insulting each other with adults present!
6. Futuristic: after almost four years in the dust and dirt of Africa - where most things are old, ill-maintained and originally of poor quality (and I don't include MAF aircraft in this!) it was weird to sit on a shiny-new ethanol-powered bus gliding into town. (I know the bus was ethanol-powered because "this bus is powered by sugar-waste" was one of the messages being shown on the TV at the front of the bus). The bus even lifts up and down to let people on and off!
You can pause live TV now as well (something which was totally lost on the kids, having never seen live TV and being perfectly used to pausing whatever they are viewing).
You can even bowl, play tennis and golf, and box without benefit of an alley, court, course or ring! (If that isn't immediately clear, my brother-in-law brought his Wii down to meet us for a couple of days).
It's not just the new innovations. Everything is shiny and new! (Most of the cars here wouldn't even be allowed on the road in the UK!) Which brings me to...
7. Wealth: I know there is a recession on (I know because I have been told; not because I saw any evidence of it), but it appears to me that everyone is fabulously wealthy. The shops are packed with people buying and selling loads of stuff. The shops in Dodoma don't have 'loads of stuff' - let alone anyone who could afford to buy it if they did!
After the 'dukas' of Dodoma, wandering through the mall in Reading was like walking past a succession of high-end art galleries. (I mean there are shops there that sell only coffee, for goodness sake!)
8. Shopping: actually shopping in some of these places is also something of an experience. For a start everything is with card - no cash! After requiring wadges of grubby Tanzania shillings to purchase anything here, I actually quite enjoyed needing nothing but a slim piece of plastic and a four-digit number to purchase whatever I wanted.
And nowadays you don't even need the trouble of interacting with a person. In Tesco and Asda we benefited from the subtle cost-cutting innovation of being able to check ourselves out. (Or at least it would be cost-cutting if they didn't have to employee a group of staff to help people check themselves out!)
9. Food: what struck me most (apart from the ability to get any kind of food you want in 700 different varieties or makes) was the fact that we could sit down to lunch and everything would be homogenised and pre-packed. And I don't mean that negatively - it's delicious that way!
10. 'Ladies' dress code: another one where the heart has trouble catching up with the head. I know mentally that the dress code is not the same in the UK and Tanzania, but after being submerged in a culture where it is a no-no to show anything above the knee or below the shoulder (except suckling mammaries of course - which seem to be pretty much public property) it is somewhat distressing to come to the UK, where there seems to be competition as to who can cover the minimum with the minimum (so to speak).
(To get this in perspective, I get pretty offended nowadays when I see a man's knees).
11. Status: I guess this is a factor of 3. In Tanzania we are 'somebody' - i.e. we are automatically accorded respect and bowing and scraping (as a rule) because we are white and therefore have money. We stick out wherever we go, and get called 'mzungu' as we pass. In the UK, no one knows us from Adam, and we have no distinguishing features as we walk down the street. I am not saying which of these is preferable, but jumping from one to the other is unsettling.
The other factor in this is that in Tanzania, people make allowances for us - for the fact that we will do things wrong, and won't know how things work. In the UK, while as a rule we know how things work, there is always a nagging uncertainty - because we don't know what's changed - we don't know what we don't know!
12. Tap water!: OK, not quite such a novelty for Libby and I (although I have to admit I do enjoy it), but for the kids this is the best thing ever. Caleb was standing in the bath, leaning over to the sink and gulping down bath-toy-fulls of tap water! "It's safe, Daddy!"
I hope that gives you a small flavour of culture-tremors in action. I have tried not to be judgemental in either direction (mainly because I can't work out which direction to judge anymore!) The main difficulty of being in the UK is the mind-beinding tension between feeling like it is completely and utterly familiar, while at the same time being completely and utterly alien. The only survival mechanism is to try and hold the two worlds apart mentally; to completely forget the one while you are in the other.
Which is the 'real' world? Tanzania or the UK? I used to think I knew...
posted by Daniel & Libby @ 4:04 am
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