Oh Oh

Well that’s just great. I was reading through my Kinyarwanda phrase book to work on my greetings in Kinyarwanda. As well as containing words and phrases, the book has many cultural tips to pass on to the reader. One of the pages was entitled “Cultural Greetings You Might Hear.” It included this phrase, tucked in between greetings such as “You are welcome here” and “We are happy to see you,” and it just about knocked me over: “Why are you so fat?” What kind of greeting is that? I will utterly die from embarrassment if someone asks me that. My only consolation will be that the other people in my group are unlikely to understand Kinyarwanda, and therefore won’t know what it means.