It's the little differences

When you move to a place like the Transkei it is pretty obvious that you are going to encounter areas where your own culture is at odds with the local culture. After all it’s one of the reasons for visiting a different culture in the first place. What is interesting then is not that you find differences at all but exactly which things are different and also which things are surprisingly similar.

The latest difference I have encountered is in the attitude to exercise. My naïve view of Africa, based on the seemingly endless supply of talented distance runners from East Africa, was of children running 10km to and from school every day and perhaps a few talented adults out on the roads training. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I go running after work often wired up to an iPod and sometimes with a head torch, thankfully no-one can see that I also have a chest strap under my shirt measuring my heart rate. To begin with I quite enjoyed the small trail of children joining me on the roads. However, the only things I notice now are the old women who, when they spot me coming, start jogging in a caricature of accentuated strides, swinging arms and a mocking giggle. Worse are the groups of young women who simply burst into fits of laughter as I go by.

When you think about it for a minute of course it’s a completely crazy pastime. They all know that I have a car and a housekeeper and could quite easily sit on my veranda sipping cool beer after work. Instead I choose change my clothes and then to run off in a seemingly random direction only to turn around at an arbitrary point and run all the way back, sometimes I do all this in the rain and the pitch dark. I don’t actually go anywhere useful, meet anyone or collect anything. I just get tired, hot and sweaty for no obvious reason at all.

Worse than running is cycling, sometimes I take a bike to a peripheral clinic and rather than drive home in a nice comfortable 4x4 I put on a yellow helmet and some strange shoes and huff and puff my way home on a bicycle instead. To someone who would walk 10km because they don't have a few Rand for public transport this clearly seems like a crazy decision.

If they knew that one of the reasons I did all this was actually to lose weight it would be the last straw. In this area you can reliably predict the income of an individual by measuring around their waist and most people spend more than half or their income on food the idea of deliberately losing weight remains completely foreign. I can't wait to tell them about those crazy foreigners who eat as much as they can only to then pay a doctor to suck all the fat out of their belly so they can start eating again.