A Culture of Greeting

The kids playing in the driveway of the guest house compound, notice the men sitting across the street outside the gate socializing and greeting each other.

A fascinating cultural difference that is stretching us now is the country’s culture of greeting.  I’ve noticed before how some people from Africa can be very intent on meeting everyone they see in a new place, but now I see the context of practice better.  Our hosts explained to us that you are expected to greet everyone you come across in a place and spend time talking to them no matter they’re doing.  It’s the responsibility of the person who’s walking by or arriving to initiate the greeting, which seems totally uncomfortable to me when we’re walking down the street to interrupt people we don’t know from what they’re doing to greet them.  But our hosts suggested that people will be offended to the point of not being willing to help you later if they remember that you didn’t take the time to value them and greet them when you came by earlier.  Another part of the greeting is that it’s not just about saying hello, but it includes an involved set of questions about the person’s health, tiredness, family, work and maybe other things too!  In our language practice, we’ve learned a number of these phrases to start with, but when we go to use them we find that we’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg because we get a lot of further questions and variations that we don’t understand yet…