Shaking Hands with Strangers

Bush Advice from Suriname

While I was visiting a friend in Paramaribo, Suriname in 1982, I became friendly with a young, local man named Mike of about my own age, which was then 28. He always had several bubbly young ladies with him, and they hung around the entrance to the covered market.

Without psycho-analysing the thing too much, he liked me because I was the first Dutch-speaking white, British person he had ever met. And I liked him, I suppose because he was the first Surinamer who was friendly to me. Then there were his female friends too. I must have been terribly naive in those days, because I had no idea what they were really doing. To put it politely, he was probably helping the girls get dates (not fruit).

They never tried to entangled me in their business though. We would talk for hours drinking beer or coffee, eating rotis and fruit. We exchanged cultural stories, anecdotes and national customs, and laughed a lot. Being British, I would always hold out me hand to shake theirs every morning. After a week or so, Mike asked whether he could offer me some ‘bush advice’. I was all ears.

“The girls and I have been discussing this for a while”, he said. “We can tell that you are a good man with a good heart, which is why we want to tell you this. You shake hands with everyone, whether you know them or not…” The girls were looking at me earnestly and nodding gravely.

“You should only shake hands with people you trust. There are bad people out there who can steal power from you, and even make you ill. Don’t do it any more, my friend, please”. I could tell that he and the girls were very serious, and that they were genuinely concerned about me.

I continued to shake hands with them for the rest of my holiday, but I never let them see me shake hands with strangers again out of respect for them. Even now, 43 years later, when I shake hands with someone I don’t know, the warning of Mike and the girls echoes in my head.

By the way, I do believe that what they said is possible, but luckily for Westerners, most of us have never learned how to exploit people in this way. There must be a few around who know how to do it though.