Just friends

‘I don’t have real friends. Never have done… But it’s fine, I know loads of people here’. The sad but honest admission from B, a Portuguese expat living in Angola. Perhaps his admission was but an exaggeration after a ‘particularly awful day’ or perhaps it was one total honesty fuelled by the whiskeys and beers he was downing to drown out these sorrows. On the face of it, this guy was a perfectly fun, happy and interesting person to chat with. If it were not for my red raw mosquito bites, I would have chatted longer. Nevertheless, underneath his seeming indifference to true friendship, I recognized an unwelcome void that I have sensed in plenty of expat partygoers.

Expats are in Luanda to make money or for a challenge, but rarely do they find themselves choosing to settle here for ties of friendship. 'B', as I will call him, is no doubt not the only businessman in Luanda who finds ‘trust’ a bitter pill to swallow, both in terms of business as well as friendship.

My first piece of advice from an expat oil worker on the plane arriving into Angola was as follows: ‘Trust no-one. If someone comes to your house, check who sent them. When served at a bar, make sure nothing extra is going into your drink that shouldn’t be… Watch your back’. Armed with this sense of suspicion I was hardly in the mood to make friends. Add this skepticism to those doing business in an extremely competitive environment and I understand B’s situation. Nevertheless, and apologies for sounding corny, but friendship and love are the essentials here- even over water and electricity.

Another business man I met explained how he did not like to socialize with the other guys from work, not only because he was keen to avoid talking shop too much, but also because he felt out of place as someone who missed his wife more than beer. This man was lucky in so much that his beautiful and overwhelming friendly wife was in town to be with him every month.

Whilst a peek into Angola’s bars and nightclubs might give the opposite impression, deep down, the majority of expats out here on their own are not happy- either craving for friends and families if they exist back home, or supplementing friendship for work, sex or drink. Indeed work, sex or drinking for many expats is like a tranquilizer, numbing the effects of home sickness or loneliness. Soon this tranquilizer, often coupled with an overriding sense of distrust takes over and makes one immune to true friendship.

With my other half chained to his office computer seemingly 24 hours a day, I have found it hard to get on in Luanda. I was also, perhaps unduly, reticent to engage with expat males who might mistake me for their next tranquilizer. In spite of this I cannot stress the amount of comfort I get in knowing that I have true friends and a loving family back home, genuinely good people that I can trust here and above all, my other half who hopefully also loves me just as much, if not more than his beer.