East Africa - A true sense of community. The ease of getting culture wrong.

Community, have we given up on it in the West? 

When you visit a foreign land, you hope to learn from the events that swirl around you. I find interpreting events and cultures to be a challenge. There is so much going on.

Do you shake hands or just hold up both hands, open palms facing your visitor in the “stick-em-up” pose? In traditional cultures, greetings and goodbyes can be important. While visiting friends in the desert, you know it is time to depart after the third cup of tea, taken in a shot glass. Greetings and goodbyes are relatively easy things to learn. But the broader templates we place over a society can be much more confusing and it’s easy to get it wrong.

Each time we leave our home and visit Toronto, Calgary or even the United States, we understand that things may be done slightly differently. And whether we know it or not, we communicate something about where we come from. But when I enter an Ethiopian village, I find it unhelpful to refer back to my old interpretations of people. Perception of time is different, family relationships are far more complicated and intertwined. And different power structures permeate every home and village. It’s easy to hit on a theory about a people, believe you have the magic decoder ring, and then realize you were wrong.

If there is any generalization one can make about rural Africa—and I realize I’m on shaky ground here—it is that visitors to a community will be greeted by an amazing display of warmth and celebration. I’ve had three such welcomes since I arrived.

Like many organizations, we distribute goats, bikes, chickens and other items to needy families, which Canadians have purchased. Today, we distributed goats to 40 families along with some other items. As soon as we arrived, the celebration began. Women standing in a neat line began swaying back and forth like branches in the wind. They started clapping and singing in unison like a choir rehearsing for the Christmas concert. An added treat here in Ethiopia is when they begin their ululating, a high-pitched, falsetto singing, common in many parts of southern Africa adn the middle east. No doubt they are celebrating because they are getting a free goat. However, it’s more than that—it’s the joy of being together as a community and the sense of receiving guests and honoring visitors to the village.

Most of us enjoy having friends visit. But here, the entire village is like one big house. Each person has a commonly connected kinship. Each mud-brown circular home with a tin or grass roof is more of a bedroom separated by some clumps of weeds or a few trees. When I visit a family and I need a cup, a stool or a pair of pants for a child I’d like to photograph, a bare-footed youngster will happily scamper to a home nearby and return with the item. That’s the advantage of living in one big house. Below the surface, as with any family, there is a web of connectedness to every home. They all have history and that history likely goes back generations.

This charming custom does create a hurdle, however, when surveying a family about personal issues such as AIDS, food security or difficult family situations. Fellow villagers within sight feel free to walk over, no matter what the conversation, plop themselves down and listen like we’re sitting in the family kitchen. In our culture, we’d consider them snoops or busybodies. But here, it’s all one big house and this is family. Family members are interested in what’s happening in their home. It is the best way I can understand a most common occurrence when chatting in homes. Even within a family, we are sometimes reluctant to admit to hard times or serious infections. So, in order to ensure accurate information about the folks I’m interviewing, I am often politely herding people, and the odd goat, out the open doors of homes.

Seeing the village as a family also helps explain why they willingly support each other with the care of livestock and children in times of need. I am constantly amazed at how even very young children have complete freedom to roam far beyond the confines of the hard-packed dirt that surrounds their home. If a child falls and begins crying -- a rarity -- anyone within earshot will swoop up the child for a hug. The community watches its own.

We keep talking about community in Canada but we fight so much to accomplish anything even close to what I see in Africa. The fact that we live in brick homes with locked doors does not help. We hide indoors from the cold weather The busyness of our lives hijacks our time. For the most part, we’ve raised the white flag on community. It’s not hard to give up on it when we tend to live such independent lives. We don’t need each other. 

It’s an anachronistic throwback to the past. I barely know my neighbor, really. I’m not normally one to get all misty-eyed and awkward at the thought of us all holding hands in a community. But I fear for the time when the world does not revolve around this. As the world begins to run out of . . . well, everything, I do wonder if the African village is a better model than what we have in the west. But I don’t think we’ll ever come close to what exists in most rural communities here in this wonderful continent.