How Not to be Scared Politely

Somewhere just north of Tucson, there is probably a gas station that sells enormous cans of Arnold Palmers in giant, floor-to-ceiling refrigerators. In the middle of this highway air-conditioned oasis, there’s trail mix with yogurt covered raisins and Takis, hung on hooks next to shelves of state-themed paraphernalia. There is a t-shirt that reads “Arizona’s two seasons: hot and hotter.” I know this must exist, or some version of it. Tanzania is below the equator, which means the seasons are reversed, my temporary reprieve from Pumpkin Spice October or Heat Wave July. There are a few methods of measuring seasons in Tanzania. One is by fruit. Avocados turn into mangos which shift into pears.

Another progression is rainy and dry. In the Manyara region, it is currently the first, shorter, rainy season. One of my irrational hatreds has always been carrying an umbrella. Just like I hate it when one car window is open but another is not, I despise shielding myself and slowing down. However, the rain here is nothing like I’ve ever experienced. It is distinct and maybe more powerful, than the Indian monsoons or Boston blizzards. Potentially, this rain is worthy of investing cold hard shillings in an umbrella. On my walk back home from school last Tuesday, my students shouted, “Madame, run!” What is normally a no big deal, a twelve-minute distance between the school and my house, felt like a battle. I squinted in order to see through the sheets of rain. I considered the students who have to walk five times the distance than I waddled.

Most of us in the country are experiencing rainy season in some capacity or another. I asked my fellow volunteer friend Anand about how he’s handling the rain. He mentioned that he’s finally taking a shower every day, without guilt or water wastage. He observed the sheer happiness on his students’ faces and it gave him joy. His village is blooming because of this climate. Agriculture is central to the way of life here. The bounty of water really does feel miraculous at times.

My buckets fill up effortlessly, but the thunder rocks the ground outside my house and makes music with the tin roof pitter-patter. The sky is gray-purple and threatening. A particularly jarring lightning flash prompted me to Google “Can You Die From A Thunderstorm While Inside Your House.” Unfortunately, National Geographic Kids informed me that concrete, the material of my floors, is a conductor and should be avoided. At four AM, in the glow of my phone light, I resolved never to use a landline or meditate on my lying face down floor the rest of my life.

Maybe it took this lugubrious search, trying to think of anything but thunder, to realize I am truly afraid here sometimes. When my neighbors come over to play Uno at night and a hyena whoops like a person, they say with a slight smirk, Usiogope. It means, don’t be scared politely. Like an instinct, I respond, Siogopi. I am not scared. But I recognize now that the response is more of a not much, you? to a passing what’s up? than a meaningful and accurate assessment of the state of my anxiety.

In the very early stages, when Tanzania was not much more than a Wikipedia page to me, I thought it was a place to stretch towards my very fullest self. I thought about all of the things that felt unmistakably now-or-never. Peace Corps service was my time to learn how to ride a bike, to practice another language, to try a new career, to live among strangers, to feel far away, and to relinquish my vegetarianism. The oft-repeated cliché of how most of us are only pretending to be adults applied. I was ready.

When friends and family asked me the inevitable, “Aren’t you nervous?” saying no did not feel so much like a call-and-response. Truthfully, once the humidity of my first home here settled on my skin, I could not help but feeling the opposite of fear: relief. The nervousness that defined my collegiate years was more of the existential type. Who will I be when I grow up? What happens if I fail this test? How will this internship look on my resume if I only write three bullet points? Where I am I going next? When I observe the people around me, I realize that the lavender-cloud-dread of a life lived in mediocrity is not there.

For myself, and in some ways for the people I live with, fear is more immediate. My principal and neighbor came over and noticed some branches overgrowing next to my front porch. “This is a problem, this is very bad,” my principal said to me in English. My neighbor mimed a pregnant woman squeezing breast milk into your eye, which is the apparent only cure if one of these plant leaves blows into your tear ducts.

Being cautious of the world’s scariness and imagining the worst possible scenario is built into my family’s blood, a little bit. If I try to cover up that part of who I am or where I am from, I think I lose a little bit of honesty. This is not to say that fear is fundamental or fixed. However, to blot out the distress from my personality with a white out pen would be incomplete. All of these feelings inside of me are worth a deeper treatment than the kind one gives to spelling mistakes. I wonder, if at some moment in time, I will reach a saturation point. Will there come a day when I will have killed enough bugs or ridden enough broken-down buses or had another joke in the classroom fall flat and I’ll think, “Nothing can phase me, I am finally fearless?”

During the tail end Early Service training, me and a few other volunteers walked out to a spot past the train tracks and sat atop a brick wall to watch shooting stars at midnight. When I first arrived at site, I strongly did not want to walk outside to pee at night. The sound of my heavy back door makes a noise louder than any pack of hyenas could be. However, I told myself that as long as I can see the stars, I am safe. It is a little check-in I do with myself. As long as the stars are in the sky, I am okay. The night on the wall, however, I could not just sit and enjoy the universe. I felt ashamed that I needed to climb atop someone else’s shoulders just to get there. At the peak, I could not help but think about my fear of falling.

There are as many different ways to be afraid in the world as there are ways to get a math problem wrong. However, there are just as many, if not more, ways, to feel safe. You can notice an eleven-year-old learning how to drive a motorcycle, shouting, “Don’t hit the white person!” and gingerly step aside and laugh. You can feel a twinge of sweetness when you realize that your second years still find ending every class with the Macarena a hoot, four months later. You can look at the clouds and not assign any doom to them. You can fill up a bucket with fresh rainwater, look for the smiles and run, laughing like a hyena, in the rain.