Africa – people -1

About Africa, there are too many stories and too much to talk about. pz is telling the stories by the time sequence, then I will use my way to talk through.

The first thing to talk about is people. Wherever you go in the world, apart from the beautiful scenery, you always have to have some sort of contact with people. The four years ago Egypt trip had given me an extremely bad impression of African. Perhaps I was too naive or perhaps I had been too unlucky, all the African I met were bad anyway (Except Omar). I don’t want to tell you how bad they were because that will make me recall the bad memory. Let’s talk about East African now.

The overall impression of East Africa people is that they are better than the people from north, sort of honest. This may due to their culture and the type of jobs. With the experience, I know that I will never trust anyone. East Africa is perhaps the world's poorest places. Poor, it’s really poor, but there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor, similar as all developing or third world countries.

Why poor? There must be reasons. They should not always only waiting for the various source of international aid from developed countries, instead they should find the reasons from themselves. That is: lazy!

Lazy is my most prominent impression of East African. During the daytime, you may always find lots of people on streets but do nothing. Some dozing, some playing cards or chess, some chatting, and some simply sitting in a trance. They are expressionless, they look like without a soul, I couldn’t read anything from their eyes. This kind of people can be seen anywhere, even if they are doing something, they look like robots.

One day on a boat, I saw the fisherman was fishing with a very simple and ridiculous way, no wonder he didn’t get any fish. Whenever I saw him, I saw his eyes were straight towards somewhere, dull and expressionless. I don’t know what he was thinking. Apparently, nothing. The only moment I saw something from his eye and his face is when he laughing at other people who were on board opposite but not covered for the sudden heavy rain.

Another day we were at an agent in Zanzibar to book a tour. There were two persons inside when we came in, one was in a phone call, and another person did nothing. When we were served we were asked to wait for a few minutes to wait a guide coming to take us on board. Just in these few minutes, those two were simply looking at the ground, do nothing. I really admire their stay ability! The guide still hadn’t arrived after a quite long time, I couldn’t stand in those silly situation and tried to talk with them. I was shocked to discover that they seemed to have forgotten what we were waiting for! That are the cases. Everybody seemed dull and no soul.

Another expression of East Africa is the really slow pace. They do anything slowly, extremely slow which you can not believe. Many people walking like an 80 years old guy, writing step by step like a child, you can not tolerate their slow working pace. If you were waiting to buy tickets, to send mail, to check-in etc (everything), you must be very patient. It is not because of the work is complicated, it’s just because of the slow working pace. How slow, how lazy, how poor they are.

Although the country is poor, it seems most people are still satisfied with their life. There is far from the pressure and tension in modern cities, people seem to enjoy this kind of lazy life.

Photos about East Africa lazy life can be viewed here: http://www.dylm.org/Africa-peoplelife/index.html

If the above link is inaccessible (such as from China) there is a Web album instead: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/l.ling.ma/AfricaPeopleSLife

To be continued ...