Minding My Business (or The Kindness of Strangers)

"Why are you sweating so much?"
"Don't hold your bag like that, put it on your head!"
"Look, she's wearing pants!" (peeking out below my dress)
"Slow down, don't walk so fast!"
"Madame, you are very elegant!"
"(silent thumbs up to my Congolese cloth skirt)"

These are some of the comments, questions and compliments that complete strangers have yelled at me since we got here.  And these are just the ones I could understand, I'm sure I missed plenty of juicy ones because of my poor Swahili. 

At first it was hard to know how to react.  Sure, a stranger who stops you to tell you how beautiful your dress is, no problem there! But unsolicited advice and personal comments are not well-appreciated in my home culture.  We have lots of sayings... "Mind your own business!"  "Don't tell me what to do!"  "Live and let live!" "Don't judge!".  We value community, but we deeply cherish our privacy and individual choice. 

I'm not sure these have a lot of meaning or value here.  It is much more of a communal culture. Everyone knows everyone else's business, and people are ready to give you a hand with your business if you seem to be doing it wrong (...which, apparently, I often am). 

The very positive side of that is that people do help each other out.  A couple of examples from personal experience:

While we were house-sitting for friends, there was a water shortage for several days. Our neighbors, whom we had not even met, filled our water tanks twice from their own supply, and refused our offer to pay for the water. 

After a checking trip to Goma, I was taking the bus from the Congo/Rwanda border to Kigali.  My seatmate appeared to be a young businessman.  I wanted to change the SIM card in my cell phone, but it was hard to open the back.  Without a word, he took the phone from my hand, opened it, and handed it back to me.  Later, he was talking on the phone and needed a pen to write something.  He just said "Kalamu" to me and stuck out his hand. Naturally I gave him a pen, he wrote what he needed to and gave me the pen back. (Later he fell asleep on my shoulder and drooled a little bit.  I pretended not to notice.)

The second time I took that bus route, I arrived in Kigali without a way to get to the airport.  Another passenger, a complete stranger, gave me advice, then insisted on finding a taxi and negotiating the price himself, so that I wouldn't be overcharged.  

Come to think of it, I wonder if "complete stranger" even has an equivalent in most African languages.