During the Q&A, I remembered a story that I haven't shared with you all, and it is still funny, so I'll share it now. It comes under the heading of "even when you are trying to be culturally sensitive, you will inevitably fail, and you have to be able to laugh about it."
On my last trip to SA, I was staying over at my friend Lynette's house. Lynette's housekeeper, Miriam, was making breakfast for me, and it just...kept...coming. Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, yogurt, fruit, more toast. I'd been told it was very rude to waste food, so I was gamely eating everything that was served although I was starting to feel slightly nauseous, but before I could tell Miriam I was finished, she brought 4 more pieces of toast.
I couldn't eat them. I knew, in my heart (and stomach), that if I ate the toast, all my breakfast was going to end up in a puddle on the floor. So I did the only reasonable thing.
I kicked it under the sofa and told myself I would get it that night after Miriam had left. I knew I didn't have time in the brief moment her back was turned to make it all the way to the trash can and back.
Later that night, I remembered the toast and dove under the sofa to get it. Turns out Miriam is a very thorough cleaner: the toast was not there. I told Lynette what had happened and moaned, "She's going to think I'm the crazy American who hoards toast under the furniture!" Lynette proceeded to chastise me about how we come from different food cultures and you absolutely cannot waste food in South Africa, it's offensive, and I'm saying "I KNOW this, Lynette, that's why I was TRYING not to seem wasteful, YOU HAVE TO HELP ME FIX IT."
So we went over to Miriam's and I apologized and Lynette proceeded to speak with her in Xhosa, giving an explanation that, I later found out, did in fact amount to "she's a crazy American, they have strange and mysterious ways." Miriam gazed at me stonily the whole time. I'm pretty sure I never redeemed myself in her eyes.
However, as I found out this week, the story is good for a laugh, and a cautionary tale: your best efforts at cultural sensitivity will still fail. Laugh about it and move on.
I'm off to a Kentucky Derby party shortly. Photos will be forthcoming.
2 comments:
You're a naughty one Shannon! LOL
Couldn't you have just said that you're not into eating a heavy breakfast of something like that? C'mon, South Africans are not that thin-skinned you know. ;-)
The fact that its a true story makes it all the funnier.
Dave, I was hamstrung! The two of them had already lamented that I was too thin, or "tiny-tiny" as Miriam said, and had taken it as a mission to fatten me up. Lynette had actually told Miriam that I had a strange illness native to my part of the world, in which the overabundance of food makes us paranoid about getting fat. In other words: an eating disorder. Which I don't have, and have never had. Some of us are just genetically slight. But Miriam had undertaken to fatten me like a calf ready for slaughter. There was no fighting it.
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