*Travel Tips>>>General - Africa & Middle East Travel Tips

I want 2 go 2 the Mother Land.?

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Tell me about Africa.

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If you are American, your ancestors probably came from West Africa. I've been to West Africa, namely, Benin and Togo. West Africa is not the romantic Africa from the movies. However, it is fascinating.

The people are hard working, but not by our standards. What I mean by that is that they do things more slowly. The average American would watch them work and think they are lazy, but the average American would give up in tears if they had to do half what the average West African has to do.

My husband is from Benin. He would better be able to tell you the difference between Africa and America, but we both have noted what I've said above. Daily chores, survival chores I mean, take up a lot of time in Africa. Washing clothes by hand in a tub, cooking over coals in the back yard, killing, beheading, plucking, cleaning, and cooking a chicken for lunch, etc. These are the things people in cities have to do every day. In the villages the work load must be many times as great. Regardless, they do not rush through these things. They move very slowly and no one complains or tries to hurry things along. This is one of the things that would make an American say they are lazy - the slow way they move.

Another difference between America and Africa that both my husband and I have noted is that Africans will stop everything for 3 or 4 days for a funeral or a wedding or some sort of celebration or another. It seems like every time my husband goes to Africa to get some work done two or three funerals take place and he is off of work for three or four days each time. While you could make a strong argument that this is a better way to approach life and death, it is certainly not the way to increase the GNP of the country.

Another thing about Africa that both my husband and I think holds it back is the communistic (for lack of a better word) thinking about wealth. My husband and I are not rich, but we are perceived to be by his large and extended family and their large and extended families. According to African tradition, we have to take care of anyone in that large and extended family who falls on hard times, and that is just about all of them. This makes it more difficult for us to get ahead so that we could actually make a difference. I'd like to save so that I could put some of his family through school and then have them do the same, but it seems like every day there is someone with a sob story who needs a handout immediately, and we cannot say no without seeming small and "unAfrican".

Anyway, I think you should go if you want to. I don't know what it would be like for a Black American in Africa. The people are very friendly and welcoming to me, though I will always be a "yovo" or "whitey" to them and will never truly become one of them. I'll be bringing our daughter to Benin this summer, but neither my husband nor I ever want to live there. We'd be happy to live a few countries away so that we can have some privacy, but we could never live in Benin. It's not that we don't love it, it's the pressures put on us by our endlessly extended family that make it unpleasant for us to stay there for long.

Good luck to you.
Others

T.I.A.
This is Africa.
Blood diamond, Leo Dicaprio...
It seems pretty harsh, but I wanna go there too.
Hmmm, one of these days.
Where in Africa do you wana go to? Africa is big.. if your a luxury person, id advise you to go to South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia or Botswana. If little makes you happy, anywhere is for you.