Greeting the Reader - Adventures in Namibia and Helena, Montana

Just  the fact of saying hello.  Of greeting another person.   It’s not something we think about a lot, but maybe it should be.

I recently took a long road trip back to my home state of Montana.  I don’t go as often as I might like.  I’m a person who feels a sense of connection to place, and the mountains of western Montana are one of the places on this planet that call to me.  I loved the trip - I like driving, and lots of the drive was through very beautiful country.  I noted runaway truck ramps in the mountains, now looking much more like they could stop tons of speeding metal than they did when I was a kid.  I saw sections of

highway in Idaho and Montana which seemed to have been tinted before they were laid down - some a pale green, others rose-colored or orange.  I saw a sign outside of Missoula, Montana advertising the Testicle Festival.  (You need to have been raised near ranches to know what that means).  I loved the road rolling under me, the vast stretches of sky, the abandoned farm buildings roadside with their ramshackle and unlikely beauty, the long stretches of road with nothing but trees, land, and sky.

I spent time at my sister’s house, cooking, talking, laughing, and catching up.  We didn’t go out much, but when we did, I found myself struck by something.  Walking into or out of a store, if someone - a man, a woman, old or young - passed by me, they’d say hello and smile.  The first time or two that it happened, I was startled enough that I didn’t have time, by the time I collected myself, to respond before they’d walked on.  When I thought about it, I had to smile.

You see, I’ve experienced it before, but from the other side.  Eight years ago, I spent a few months teaching in Namibia in southern Africa.  I was assigned to a small school in northern Namibia.  In “the North,” we were told in orientation, there was a very important local custom:   greeting.  Any person

you encountered, you greeted - not to do so was to insult them.  In Oshiwambo (the local language), the greeting went like this:  

Person A:  Wu uhala po.  

Person  B: Ee-ee.

A: Onawa tuu?

B: Ee-ee, ngoye wu uhala po?

A: Ee-ee.

B: Onawa ngaa?

A: Ee-ee, Onawa.

Roughly translated as:   How are you?   I’m well.  Really?  Yes, and you?  I’m well.   Good.  Yes, Good.  

You did this greeting with every person.  It was an adjustment, feeling awkward at first, but I came to love it.  I particularly recall walking along a path through the brush near the village of Onankali.    I had come there to visit another volunteer, a friend, and we were on our way to a church service in the village.  An older woman came around a bush on the path ahead of us, clearly in her Sunday best, and greeted me, and smiled with delight, taking my hand and speaking in rapid Oshiwambo when I responded.  I didn’t know much of the language, and could only continue the greeting with her, but she was delighted.  At the school where I worked, most of the daily greeting was done in Namibian sign language, as it was a school for the deaf, so I hadn’t learned much of the dozens of variations of the local language spoken in the region, but she didn’t care - I had greeted her appropriately.  When we got to the church, she introduced me to the other women as “kuku McKenzie” - “grandmother McKenzie” - in their culture, a high honor.   I also remember the times I failed to greet appropriately, and being taken to task for it once in a taxi with another woman, who told me I should learn better.  

It was this training that stayed with me for some time after I returned.  When our group returned to the States, we landed at Dulles International, and a group of us stayed the night at a local hotel while we waited for our outgoing connections the next day.  At the hotel that night, we wanted some ice in the room, so I walked down the hall to the ice machine, and, when a man was walking toward me down the hallway, I greeted him with a Hello.  It was automatic - one greeted people.   He looked at me as though I had shouted at him, and scurried away down the hall.  After a startled moment, I laughed - I still often laugh when I think about it.  This is how I felt in Helena, Montana when people greeted me.  

The population density in Montana and Namibia is about the same - about 6 people per square mile.  Maybe when there are less people, it becomes more important to connect.

This is what has me thinking about the relevance of all this to writing.  In writing - there are,in a very real way - just two people:   you and the reader.   What we need to do as writers, each and every time we sit down to write, is to greet them - they are a part of our story, and we need to remember their faces as we work.  We need to turn, see them, and make sure they are there with us by acknowledging that they are something more than anonymous passers-by.