The other day, I did an update advising diaspora Nigerians visiting Nigeria. Let me flip it around and offer some advice to home-based Nigerians visiting us in the diaspora.
- When you visit, please know that diaspora life is a rat race and that your Nigerian hosts/relatives may be be too busy working to pay their bills to take care of you or take you to places. It’s nothing personal and it’s not that they don’t love you or want you to have a good time on your vacation. Diaspora life is just too stressful, with little down time.
- Use Uber to run your errands unless you can wait till weekend, when the pressure of work and kids’ school is gone and your hosts can drive you around. On weekdays, the pressure of work and school keeps diaspora Nigerians running around like mad people.
- Please tip people who provide you service or serve you food in restaurants. It is a way to appreciate and augment the meager income of service employees. Start practicing your tipping from the airport with people who help you with your luggage or help push the wheelchair if you’re using one. Tipping is a culture here and is expected. Don’t be too cheap to participate in it.
- Given the exchange rate difference, stop converting every price or service fee to Naira. If you do not mentally avoid that, you’ll find it hard to purchase anything for yourself let alone for others who will be expecting presents from Obodo Oyinbo.
- Do not take friendliness to be an invitation to encroach on people’s privacy. People value their private space and do look favorably on strangers intruding into it.
- If you’re a man, check your patriarchal sense of entitlement at the airport upon arrival because it could get you into serious trouble. Do not make gender-insensitive jokes because they will not be taken as jokes. They will offend people. And definitely do not make inappropriate comments and remarks to the opposite gender, the way you’re accustomed to doing in Nigeria. There’s a story of a visiting Nigerian who pissed off his American hosts with his comments when he was asked about how he planned to feed during his stay, since he was here by himself away from his family. He responded to his female questioners like a typical Nigerian patriarchal man: he said why should he worry about his wife not being around to cook for him when he was in the midst of wonderful women like his interlocutors who would feed him. I guess he thought he was making a joke. His female interlocutors were his colleagues and hosts. They were not amused. Needless to say, news of his offensive sexism went all the way to the top of the organization and burned all his bridges and goodwill.
- If you’re in government with access to easy government money, when you come to do your luxury shopping here, take it easy with flaunting your cash dollar. This is largely a cashless economy and it is quite unusual and vulgar to carry around bundles of hundred dollar bills and even more vulgar to pay for big purchases like cars and machinery with cash. It may spook the sellers and/or get them to call in the secret service to investigate you.
- Related to number 7 above, when we accompany you to do your high end shopping, please spare a thought for people like us who have to work for every dollar we have and cannot do big time shopping like you. In other words, do not spoil our market with our regular customers or store owners. There is a lady from our church whose brother, a government official in a South South state, came visiting. He was building a house and his sister took him to a high-end store to buy limited edition furniture and other accessories for his new home. He spent tens of thousands of dollars in just one hour. The shop owner, a long time customer of his sister’s, was blown away. He told the lady and her brother that no one had ever bought this much material from the shop in one feel swoop. When she went back to the shop to pick up an item for herself several weeks after her brother had left (having paid for his materials to be shipped to him in Nigeria), the store owners, who were usually friendly with our church sister, were no longer interested in her. All they kept asking her was when her brother would visit the States again and if she would bring him to the store again as she promised. They only wanted to talk about her brother. She went back there another time but the interaction with the store owners was the same: “when is your brother coming back?” Please bring him to the store. She stopped going to the store. That was how her visiting big man brother destroyed a business and personal relationship she had nurtured for years with that store.
- If you’re not as rich as the government man discussed above and are staying in a Motel 6, do not go to the other part of town and take photos in a Marriot or a Four Seasons and share with your friends and family in Nigeria to deceive them that you’re staying there. It’s okay if you can only afford a Motel 6. There is no shame in that, given the brutal exchange rate. It’s a decent hotel. No need to embellish your American touristic experience.
- Do not go to a store looking for pants (Americans call it underwear). The store assistant will direct you to the section/aisle for “trousers.” Conversely, if you need to buy trousers, tell them you’re looking for pants. That’s how they roll here. The Americans had a revolution that not only “liberated” them from the English Crown but also Americanized and separated their English from that of the mother country, Britain/England.
Welcome to America. Enjoy your stay.
Source: Facebook