The Dutch are known as greedy people. As we learned during our “Cross Cultural Studies” course, stereotypes are not always wrong, but it is important to understand that there are more sides to someone or a group of people than just the stereotype. Greedy or not, it was a slight culture shock for us to experience how generous people are in Toraja. Whether they spoke English or not, everyone here is willing to help us out.
Today, the 25th of April, is the first day of our research. We went into the field with an exploratory approach to collect the first data and to gain more insight in the area. This type of research we had already done one year ago in Amsterdam and during this project we experienced many people refusing to help us out with questionnaires. With this background, we entered the data collection in Sulawesi a bit worried, but as soon as we started talking to people in Rantepao, we noticed how friendly the people here are. Everyone was willing to help us out and if they did not speak the language, they would call a colleague or a family member to help us out. We had a really pleasant conversation with a man working at the tourism office, who was also a tour guide and who was even willing to help with our research and give us a tour for a cheap price, because he really wanted to help us out and believed our research was important to him and Toraja.
This was not the only positive experience we have had today with inhabitants of Toraja, as we also had a wonderful time interviewing the owner of a restaurant called Mambo. He took all the time necessary to answer our questions as well as possible and gave the four of us a fruit juice and tea for free. After eating there, he even offered us a discount for our food, which we thankfully declined. We also gave him a can of “speculaas” cookies. Yes, Dutch people can be generous, too! In all seriousness, the Dutch being greedy may be a correct stereotype or not, but the local people are so generous that it made us reflect on how generous we are ourselves in our daily lives in Holland.
Our lesson for today: research can be fun and you do not need to be rich to be generous!
Written by: Joëlle De Raaff and Angela Scheepers
