Dr ABIGAIL KABANDULA
ONE winter afternoon in Boston, I found myself standing outside a friend’s apartment building, wondering whether I had violated an unspoken social rule. I had texted earlier to say I was in the neighbourhood and thought I might stop by. A reply arrived
almost immediately: “Today isn’t great. Let’s find a time next week.” The response was perfectly polite. Yet as I stood there in the cold, I realised I was still learning the social grammar of my adopted home.
I grew up in Zambia, where friendship often unfolds differently. Relationships emerge through family, faith communities, neighbourhoods, workplaces, and chance encounters. They are less
structured and less dependent on planning. Friendship is not something one schedules so much as something one inhabits.
When I arrived in Boston more than a decade ago, I found this difference difficult to navigate. Nearly every aspect of social life seemed to require coordination. Calendars were consulted before coffee. Dinners were planned weeks in advance.
Even casual conversations often began with an invisible assessment of time and availability.
At first, I mistook this structure for distance.
Networking events, abundant in Boston, are frequently open with questions about work.
What do you do? Where do you work? The answers often determined the course of the conversation. Occasionally, if it became apparent that little professional value could be exchanged, the interaction ended almost as quickly as it had begun.
Perhaps this was not insincerity so much as a different way of organising social life. Yet to someone raised in Zambia, where conversations often begin with family, health, and community before moving to professions and titles, the contrast felt striking.
Life was already overwhelming. I was balancing the demands of doctoral studies with the responsibilities of being a young mother. Most of my meaningful friendships were within my doctoral cohort. Even there, spontaneity gradually gave way to scheduling.
Once seminars ended, coffee conversations had to be arranged through calendars and text messages.
It took years to get to know my neighbours. Our exchanges rarely extended beyond greetings or brief comments on the weather. My son’s playdates were organised with remarkable precision, often starting and ending at exact times. If I arrived a few minutes late, I could sense a subtle disapproval, however politely it was concealed.
What I missed was not simply friendship but a different understanding of time. In Zambia, time often bends around relationships. In America, relationships bend around time.
There were days when I longed to call a friend and say, “I’m on my way over,” with no particular purpose other than wanting company. In Zambia, such a call would have been considered a courtesy. In America, it often felt like a breach of etiquette. Even among close friends, unannounced visits were rare. Friendship required coordination. Calendars had to align, and availability had to be negotiated. A simple visit could take weeks to arrange.
This stood in sharp contrast to my upbringing. As a young woman living in Lusaka, I often found that the only preparation required before visiting a friend was a quick phone call, and sometimes not even that.
People arrived unannounced and were warmly welcomed.
Whether there was nshima left over from lunch, a cup of sweet tea, roasted groundnuts, or a full meal on the stove, something always found its way to the table. Guests were treated as though they had been expected all along. I often left those visits feeling lighter. We talked through frustrations, celebrated small victories, and shared the ordinary details of our lives. Friendship served as a form of emotional sustenance.
It offered many benefits of therapy without the formality or expense.
One of my fondest memories comes from living in a small town in Northern Zambia.
People would stop by our home simply because they hadn’t seen us for a few days and wanted to check in. They would settle into a chair, ask how we were doing, comment on the weather or local happenings, and stay long enough for a meaningful conversation. Occasionally, their visits disrupted my plans, especially when I was rushing to work. Yet their concern was genuine.
At first, I found these visits surprising. Some of the people knocking on our door were people I barely knew. Yet they offered something rare: the belief that another person’s well-being was reason enough to interrupt one’s day. There was no calculation involved. They were not measuring their time against my worth. They came because they cared. Decades later, I still think of those people and their generosity. Most have likely forgotten me, yet I remember them. I remember the conversations, the unexpected visits, and the feeling of being cared for simply because I was part of the community.
Over time, however, I came to appreciate aspects of American friendship as well.
Planned gatherings were rarely interrupted. Commitments were honoured, and people respected one another’s time and boundaries. There was a reliability to the arrangement, even if I sometimes missed the spontaneity of home.
Years later, I found myself doing what I once resisted. Before calling a friend, I checked my calendar. Before dropping by, I sent a text. Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the habits of my adopted home.
Then I befriended another Zambian living in Massachusetts.
Sometimes she would call with only a few minutes’ notice to say she was coming over.
Occasionally, she would decide she was too tired to drive home and would sleep in my guest room. At other times, we would embark on entirely unplanned shopping trips or spend a weekend together simply because neither of us wanted to be alone. There was comfort in that spontaneity. It felt familiar.
It reminded me of friendships shaped less by calendars and convenience than by presence.
Perhaps this is one of the silent challenges of diaspora life. We learn new social customs and adapt to unfamiliar expectations while carrying memories of different ways of relating to one another. Over time, we become fluent in both. I have learned to live by calendars and invitations. Yet part of me still believes friendship begins with an unexpected knock at the door, followed by hours of conversation with no agenda beyond enjoying each other’s company.
The author holds joint fellowship appointments at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver and University of Edinburgh Law School
