Politcally Correct?

Political correctness is a concept that has yet to land on these shores. Coming from a country where PC-ness is highly valued (or at least expected) we are times shocked or amused by instances of political incorrectness that we come across, or more usually are the recipients of.
It is very rarely that we are able to leave the house without local children and sometimes men (it seems the women are above this sort of behaviour) calling out ‘mzungu!’ Now the literal translation for this word is ‘one who walks around in circles’ and apparently the expression was coined when Westerners first arrived in East Africa. Ask someone now what it means and you will hear that it means a white person or westerner. The thing that I am surprised by is that the children and young men in our neighbourhood are quite accustomed to seeing us and other ‘wazungu’ (plural form) on a regular basis, so I find it odd that they still feel the need to call us this particularly as we do in fact have names that they could call us by.
This daily surprise (sometimes mild irritation – I do have a name!) I experience was eclipsed by a recent experience in a photo shop. Rich needed to get some passport photo’s to update his UK driver’s licence, so we headed to the photo shop in town. Now here there is no photo machine. A lady sticks a camera in your face and takes a photo which she then edits to change the background colour and re-orientate the picture so that you are not diagonally across the picture. The pictures are then printed out, cut up and put in a little envelope for you to take away upon payment. When I turned up to collect the photo’s I was immediately given an envelope although I hadn’t been asked to give a name. Why? Because someone had written ‘mzungu’ across the top of the envelope and that obviously must be me!
This insistence of referring to us and our team mates as ‘wazungu’ often leads to confusion. As many of you know, our internet is tediously slow when it works and sometimes it just gives up all together. There have been occasions when we or one of our team mates has had reason to call our ISP in order to get an engineer to come and see just how bad our connection is. Now, back home our name would be taken and written down in order to ensure that the engineer goes to the correct address. Not so here. Although we may give a name, they seem to choose not to take any notice of it and instead sent the engineer to the mzungu’s house in Chukwani (the, sort of, area we live in). This leads to engineers turning up at Jason and Roxanne’s house and refusing to understand that their internet is actually fine and they don’t need an engineer while ours is up the creek and we would actually quite like some help please! Oh for some order and organisation!! This all just goes to show that it IS important to use people’s names and that political correctness can be useful in its own way!!