An South African experience

When we, Ronja Malachowska and Katharina Stark went to high school we decided that we wanted to go to Africa and work with children. We started to look for organizations that need volunteers on the internet but we could not find anything that suited us. Katharina started to talk to her teacher; Gunilla about her plans and Gunilla told her that she just had come home from a global school trip to South Africa where she had met some wonderful people. On that trip she visited an organization called Ziphakamise and they also had a childrens home. Gunilla told us to e-mail Lynne Footit from Ziphakamise and ask her if we could come and work at the childrens home (Emseni) starting from August 2008.

Lynne told us that we could not come before the beginning of 2009 because they just received their first Swedish volunteer (Ulrika Ronmark) ever who also had gotten in touch with them trough twinning.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SOUTH AFRICAN AND SWEDISH CULTURE



This is a subjective summary about differences between the Shout African and Swedish Culture, written on the basis of our own experience and meetings with people under our six months in South Africa. We want to emphasize that this is not any definite fact. Over the 45 million people that live in South Africa we have only meet a few and of the big country we have only seen a little bit, we have mostly just stayed in Port Shepstone a small town in the eastern Kwazulu Natal, so this country, whit its enormous amount of different cultures and people can hardly get a fair assessment/judgment from the basis of what we have seen.

Ronja Malachowska & Katharina Stark, 5 August 2009
The Social standards

In South Africa people are a lot more open and social than in Sweden. It is natural to talk to strangers, like the woman in front of you in the queue or the man on the bus. In Sweden you rather sit alone on the bus, you don not talk to strangers more than is necessary.

In Sweden if you want some on to do you a favor, you ask for it, for example you would say “Could you give me that book, please?” in the South African culture it is more common to order other people, for example “Give me that book, please.” In South Africa you go more directly to the point, whiteout beating about the bush, while in Sweden you could be a lot more indistinct/diffuse to get to your point, when you speak to one another. Like for example you and your friend are at a party and you start to get tired and want to go home, a Swedish person would say to his/her friend, “Is it not getting late, don’t you won’t to go home now?”, while a South African person would say “It’s way to late now, we are going home.”.