Working in another country makes one take a long hard look at the customs that you take for granted. Take for instance driving in Dar es Salaam. It is nothing like driving back home in South Africa. The best way to describe it is that it is like driving a dodgem car and best you dodge! The chief rule here is ‘he who pushes his or her way in first, goes’. If you don’t push, you don’t go. Certainly not a place to hire a car if you suffer from road rage!

OK, so driving is not really a cultural issue. It is of course rather difficult to ask a local about the things that would offend them most, without of course offending them! The thing is that even if someone did give me a list, I probably would get a different list from someone else. It seems rather obvious that not everyone would have the same list but you then again you would expect to find some similarities.

I heard someone telling a story about a boyfriend coming over to visit. Her mother was horribly offended by the fact that this ‘boy’ did not bother to remove his cap when inside. She was heard to ask how he could be so arrogant as to think that her roof would leak on his head! I heard another story of a girl at a new boyfriend’s house. She was offered a cup of tea. Not liking milk in her tea, she asked her boyfriend to ask his mother to make hers black. The mother did so and as she handed it over, she said, ‘Here is your black tea, as a guest in my house, you should take it as it comes’.

Aish! These are people who lived in the same neighbourhood! Surely one would think that they would have had the same sensibilities and yet they did not. Funny that humans are so sensitive about such silly things.

Perhaps we need to be looking well beyond the obvious in people’s behaviour to the deeper substance that is really the frightened, lonely person inside.

Or perhaps we should just be nice and learn to say sorry in 46 different languages, just in case!