PEOPLE

It’s time to say some more words about people. This would be my personal opinion, so you might hear different stories from other people visiting Africa, but as I said I find them very unenthusiastic, a bit lazy, but with special feeling for a people. They would accept someone to live in their house, give them food without demanding anything in return. And as they want to take advantage of foreigners and people they don’t know, they are in this respect very honest. I mean people don’t take advantages of someone that kindly offers what he has, but do take advantages with other things. Besides this, as a friend of mine said, they are waiting for white people to do things and do complain how poor they are without really doing things that would improve their position. Of course everything again depend on who are you dealing with. Once my student said he wants to go to Slovenia. I said he is welcomed to visit me in my house, whenever he decides to come. Of course, he said he doesn’t have money to go there (for him it would be normal that I would kindly offer him to buy him a flight ticket). They quite often complain to me how busy they are, but if they only had move a bit faster, they would succeed to do much more things. “Wait just a second” mains wait and wait and wait. When they meet each other, they say hi, how are you (kuma), respond ok (esta bem) and than they just look around. This is what I meant with “unenthusiastic”. Or for example ;) I asked them what they are doing during their free time, during Sunday or…. Well, believe it or not, they are not doing anything. Things like reading books, playing football, going for a walk, visiting friends don’t really exist. They sit out-front and comment football, making each other stylish haircuts and that is about it. The majority of people earn money with selling all kinds of things on the street, from water in plastic, fishes, bread, bananas, mangos, palm oil, anything you can imagine. There is enormous amount of food markets all over the place. People carry things on their heads and not in bags. Some people work in all kinds of stores, most of them of them for clothes stores; other people work in different kind of organizations. I haven’t seen anyone begging for money jet what is in a way “normal” because only locals and a few foreigners, who came to work here, actually live here. This country is not tourist destination (haven’t seen anyone jet). Local women more or less wear their typical dresses, long skirts with typical top. Men in general wear long trousers and a t-shirt. If you know what the temperature is here, wearing long trousers (also jeans) is quite amazing, but on the other hand because of mosquitoes quite reasonable. Relationship between men and women is unfortunately still an issue. Lots of women are unemployed and treated as less worthy. There is a woman, called Filipa in our house. In a last war she lost a leg and her husband told her to leave, because she will not be able to do things around the house. “No one wants to marry woman with only one leg” she said. Now she lives with us, with her niece, Celestine, my hostess. One guy noticed something else. They don’t have houses with two or more floors; everything is built horizontally and not vertically, as their relations are. Quite reasonably, few people are educated and the question of higher importance of someone is not a jet a real issue.