Come a little closer!

February 12

Sometimes I feel as though I'm closer to Zambians than Canadians. Well, in proximity, anyhow. Proxemics (I sure hope I'm spelling that right) is the study of personal bubbles, closeness, and touch. If you broadly generalized Canadians, you might see that they demand quite a bit of personal space. In Zambia, I have noticed the complete opposite.

Touch is part of the culture here. And, in some ways, it is necessity.

Take meeting someone for example. Each time you greet somebody - for the first time or the five hundredth time - you shake their hands. And handshaking involves more touch as well. You clasp hands, shake once, then twist your hands around each others' thumbs, squeeze, revert back to hand shake, and shake again. If you think that the handshake is over, you're likely wrong. Typically, you continue holding hands through at least the introductions. In some cases, you'll keep holding hands until the end of the conversation. If the conversation begins while walking, you may very well hold hands as you walk down the road. From what I understand, it is a sign of friendship and respect. Even still, it still caught me by surprise the first time I walked down the road, hand in hand, with a taxi driver.

Touch is embedded in the culture here but also occurs because it simply needs to. Consider the mini-bus. Recently, I hit a new mini-bus capacity high-score. Twenty-two. Mini-buses have the capacity to reasonably hold perhaps twelve individuals. To fit twenty-two means squashing extra people in each row, crushing a few behind the front row, squatting, facing the rest of the bus. And don't forget ducking people into the sliding door jam! Oh look - your personal bubble just popped! Now you have chickens pecking at you, children making faces, and a big woman shuffling closer to you to fit yet another passenger. And somehow it isn't uncomfortable at all perhaps because it isn't somebody invading your space. Each person in your space is sacrificing their own as well to ensure that more people can get where they're going. It's a 'greater good' kind of sacrifice.

It's been a bit of a shift getting used to all the touch here. If somebody knocks elbows with you back home, it seems perfectly rational to get into a tiff about it. Here, though, it's perfectly good intentioned and it's hard to get upset about something that makes you feel like one of the locals.