A different perspective

One of the coolest things about traveling is that if you manage to do it properly and actually interact with local people, you very often get an interesting glimpse into how different cultures perceive things differently than you do.

An amusing example from my Uganda trip involved a conversation with the driver I hired to take me to the airport in Entebbe, about an hour's trip from Kampala. The driver, R, was very inquisitive, as people so often are with foreigners, and his queries were typically African. First he wanted to know about Canada. What was our main export crop? I had a tough time with this. At first I answered, "Oil." He didn't like this. "Oil money is bad money," he told me. (Where Africa is concerned, it's hard to disagree.) I mentioned timber, but he wasn't wild about that either. I finally hit the mark when I mentioned wheat. "Ah!" he said approvingly. "Wheat is good."

His questions then turned personal. He wanted to know if I was married, and whether I had children. He didn't much care for my answer on the latter question. I'd anticipated that; in Africa, you really ought to have as many children as possible. Next, he wanted to know whether I owned any land. He was equally unimpressed with my admission that my sole property claims at the moment amounted to half a condo in Calgary.

"Eh?!" he cried. "No land? You know, the measure of a man is his land." He paused, frowning. "Does your family have land?" I could tell he was getting ready to pity me.

"I suppose so," I said. "Some of my family have quite a lot, actually, up in the north of Canada."

"Ahhhh," he sighed in relief. "And cows?"

"Many cows."

"Maaany cows," he repeated with obvious satisfaction. "Many cows is good."

R. is relatively well off by Ugandan standards. He lives in the city, drives a passable car. His name is known among expats as a reliable driver. Still, R. probably exists well below the poverty line of most countries. Even so, as a man from a part of the world where wealth is measured in land to till and cattle to rear, he was on the verge of considering me a very poor young woman indeed. Only an indirect connection to some Angus and Holstein in northern Alberta saved me from being an object of pity.

As someone who is about to drop almost a million bucks for an apartment, I found that a singularly refreshing perspective.