Mambo Vipi??

Greeting is an essential part of Tanzanian culture. Some people spend five, maybe ten minutes simply greeting eachother, typically holding hands the entire conversation. There are about 5 different ways to first greet someone and these are all based on age. When greeting an elder, it is your responsibility to start the conversation and only use the polite terms of everything. For people more around your age, "mambo" is thrown out every directions. To this, there are many ways to reply. They all, in one way or another, translate back to "fine". A typical conversation between two people could translate to this: Hey, how are things? Good. Problems? -no problems. How's the morning- Fresh. Hows the house? -Peace. How are the children- Clean. How is your partner-ok. Hows work?- Nice... and on and on and on. And the trick is... there is never a negative answer. If your parents are dead but someone asks hows are your parents, you say good. If you just found out you have cancer and someone asks how are you, you say good. The backbone of relationships are built soley on these greetings. To impress the Rastas with street talk, we throw out the ocassional, Mzuka... which they then think we're the coolest people around! It's really quite neat how much emphasis is put soley on greeting; maybe this is something our culture needs to put a little more effort into.