The Right Thing to Do

When Meg and I left on this trip, we got a massive amount of support and good wishes, and a lot of long hugs as people asked us to promise to take care of ourselves and each other. Every once and a while, we'd dig a little deeper with the people we loved to find out what they were most worried about on our year away. The answer was always the same: Africa.

It's easy to understand why: weird tropical diseases, HIV-infection rates wiping out a generation, and widespread poverty ripping through a continent that's still struggling with the arbitrary borders and hierarchies created by colonialism. I'd be freaked out if someone I loved was going there too! And in case we needed any reminder of the horrors of darkest Africa, Meg and I went to an old Italian theater to watch a bootlegged DVD of Hotel Rwanda last Friday. I like to think of myself as a seasoned traveller who treats all people the same, but I gotta say, after watching a story about one million Rwandans massacring each other over the course of a few months, I found myself looking over my shoulder a bit more often as we walked home at night through the streets of Asmara.

I get angry at myself when I think about this, wondering if I'm letting embedded racism trump the overwhelmingly positive experience we've had in Africa so far. Though we've been on the continent for less than a month, we already have a dozen stories of kindness shown to us by strangers here. The random Egyptian man who spoke no English but saw we had given away the last of our Egyptian pounds getting to the wrong terminal for our flight, and picked us up and drove us 5 miles late at night for free . Our new friend Eden who happened to spend some time in Houston (and met a friend of Meg's Dad while she was there) putting us up for free when we arrived in Asmara and taking care of us for weeks. Tesfalidet, a 25 year-old English teacher, who met me on a bus heading to the town of Keren and changed all his plans so that he could show me around "his town" for the day, insisting on paying for my lunch and drinks along the way, asking only that I send him a letter once I got back to America. You ride the streets of Eritrea and you see burnt-out tanks and armored vehicles littering the ravines, reminders of a nasty war with Ethiopia and its allies that ended (mostly) not so long ago, only to give way to a famine from which people are still recovering. But Asmara feels safer than San Francisco, and the people we see around us, who must know that we're carrying enough money on our bodies to feed a village for years, are gracious and kind and take care of us.

And yet I watch Hotel Rwanda, I read about Darfur, I listen to radio reports about Liberia or Angola or the Ivory Coast or the Congo, and it scares me. I think about our upcoming destinations and worry about what strange African danger is lurking around the corner. And that's healthy, I suppose. It's better to be cautious, and I shouldn't generalize from my limited experience here. After all, I promised my momma I'd come home in one piece, and thinking that Nairobi will be safe because of some good experiences we've had in Asmara is kind of like saying that London is safe because we met some really nice people in Finland once.

But the fact is (and I know this won't make our moms feel any better), every day we're in situations where if someone really wanted to rob us (or worse) and take advantage of our white skin and inability to speak the local language, they could. Yet, every day we watch strangers bend over backwards to make our travels comfortable. And we try to be smart and accept their generosity without putting ourselves in dangerous situations. Yesterday, we spent ten minutes in a van, driven by a Eritrean and filled with 20 men from Yemen, arguing about the fare we were being charged (the amount we were sparring over - $2). As the Eritrean got angrier and angrier with us, one of the Yemenis stepped in, bridged the language gap and negotiated a compromise. We made friends with him over the rest of the drive as he proudly recited the English alphabet and celebrated the fact that his friend sitting next to him was the same age as Meg. Then, as we reached his stop and he got out of the van, he invited us for a ride with him and his friends in his fishing boat out in the Red Sea. Meg and I looked at each other, wanting to go, wanting the adventure and to trust in this man's kindness, and we said no. We couldn't make the leap and take the risk with a stranger who spoke very little English, putting our money and passports and lives in his hands when no one knew where we were. But I wonder now, would we have gone if it had been a nice white Aussie man making the offer? Probably.

The first priority for us is to come home safe. And I have no doubt that we made the smart decision, and we'll do the smart thing again, probably many times more before we leave Africa. But after all the goodness that we see around us in Africa, I wish that the horrifying images from Hotel Rwanda (and virtually every article on Africa you see in an American paper) weren't so overwhelming, and that the smart decision would also be the right decision, the one where you trust the people around you, even in Africa.

--rahul