Kissing fest

In the good old days, it was considered foreign to shake hands except at very special occasions. A retired naval man told me, with typical pride and self assurance, “we only shake hands once: at the first meeting. Never again.” Barristers take it further: shaking hands with another barrister is strictly forbidden.

Then the foreign habit started to spread, and shaking hands became more and more normal. In Africa it is huge, and in some settings you are expected to shake hands with everyone before and after every meeting.

But wait, there’s more. Increasingly, at social occasions when arriving and leaving women must kiss everyone, while men shake hands with men and kiss the women.

To make everything more elaborate, in the Congo we’ve adopted the Belgian/French (not sure which) habit of three kisses to the cheek – left, right, left. Which means that if there’s a big gathering, saying hello and goodbye can take quite a while. Last night we went to a dinner party attended by seven women and 5 men. By my calculations, this means that there were over 100 kisses that evening.

Very friendly.

A belated Christmas story

The Congo is very religious, with the Catholic church counting about 70% of the population in its flock. So Christmas is big.

Much to our relief, though, there’s not much commercial exploitation of the festival. A few Christmas trees here and jolly lights there and that is basically it. The only shop that has gone wild is Shoprite, a South African supermarket, that’s pushed out its regular special offers in favour of Chinese laughing santas, plastic Christmas trees and crackers. A couple of shops have had their “Joyeux Noel” signs up the whole year – why bother to take them down, only to put them up again 11 months later?

This doesn’t mean that it is not the season for giving, and as the day approached tensions rise. Walk around town during the week before Christmas and total stranger will come up to you and ask for a Christmas present. Staff are given a thirteenth cheque as the office closes down on the 22^nd, and supplies of rice and chicken run low as employers buy for their staff.

But why wait until the last week? A lot of expatriates go away for Christmas, so the seven employees in our compound (three security guards, gardener, stair cleaner and two additional night guards) decided to tackle the problem head on. They composed and printed a multi colour Christmas card, in English and French, for the eight families living in the block, with the customary greetings for Christmas and New Year. This was given to each household in a smart envelope three weeks before the big day.

It couldn’t be ignored, so we had to embark on a research programme. Would they want food or cash? Or something else? If cash, how much would they expect? Each person had a different answer, but there was a rough consensus that cash and food was generally what was expected. And if food, it should be rice and chicken. Someone had the bright suggestion that we could save money if we bought the rice in 50kg sacks, and the chicken in a 25kg box of pieces.

Sure – it saved money but. The chicken was deep frozen so we had to thaw it out enough to separate the pieces – a slow and messy business. Ladling the rice from the sack into used plastic shipping bags also took ages. Rice has got a way of spreading itself, like toast crumbs, so we ended up with rice all over the kitchen floor.

Anyway, it’s done. When I got back from work after the first distribution had taken place, the security guard on duty followed me until I had parked the car. Standing formally in front of me he said, “I would like sincerely to thank you, on behalf of myself, my co-workers and my family for your generous present. We wish you a very happy Christmas and a happy new year. May God bless you!”

That made it all worth it.