Bugs & Fears

Before I left, and even before I had decided to come to Cape Town, people would ask me: “well aren’t you scared?” or say, “well Africa is really far away, will you be okay being so far from your family?”

And even now that I’m here, these questions have continued. Be it cabbies, classmates or bank employees, I’m always asked “Well weren’t you scared to go so far away?” or “So you’re telling me you had never been to Cape Town and decided to move here?” and “How do your parents feel about your being in AFRICA, alone?”

It’s really made me think about fear and what it means to be scared — well this and my near death encounters with creepy crawlies that have wounded my pride. Obviously, I was scared to leave my job, leave my friends, and leave my family to come to a new country. It’s a tough decision and it’s intimidating, but even on a grander scale, moving and traveling to new places doesn’t make it into my top fears. And though I’m in a different time zone, on a different continent and taking up a masters program where I’m regularly learning how little I actually know, what I’m most scare of is:

1. Bugs
2. Sinkholes
3. Zombies

I recognize how ridiculous this sounds, but if at any given moment someone asked me my fears, that is what I would say… also maybe deep open water, but you get the picture. In the world of seriously “scary” issues, these are the things that I recognize as my fears. And yes, I do understand that the potential for sinkhole and zombies encounters are low, but then again my track record with bugs includes sleepless nights and expensive home repellents and sprays.

In our flat we have had some crawly visitors that have left me skittish and unwilling to enter rooms without turning on lights and cautiously making my way forward. When I expressed my concern to my flatmates and recommended we look into exterminators or nuclear bombs, they didn’t seem to empathize with my fears. I did explain my irrational distaste for anything with more than 4-legs, and even demonstrated my fears by telling my Costa Rica interview story.

I was interviewing for a position in Costa Rica and one of the questions they asked me was “how I felt about bugs and insects?” Now at the time, I tried to play it cool and keep my answer nonchalant, when the person went on to tell me that on her second day a tarantula crawled out of the shower drain, I think my face when pale. After the interview I spent many of hours consulting with friends and family if they thought I’d actually be able to overcome such a fear, and even did serious research about the types of bugs and their prevalence in that region of Costa Rica.

Even when retelling the story, I get creeped out, but when I told my flatmate this story, she simply looked at me and said, “Are those poisonous?” Now I don’t know if tarantulas are poisonous, but I do know that story elicits a different response at home and in my personal circles. From there she went on to tell me about the giant cockroaches at her parents’ house and how a family friend gets these huge locus that actually sounded a lot like blastended skrewts.

There are plenty of things here (and at home) that could cause me harm, but still I do those things. There are gates on our windows and doors, an actual electric fence around my apartment complex, plenty of “stash it, don’t flash it” signs on the streets, and I do not walk at night. Bad things can happen anywhere, but at what is the balance between the fears in our heads v. actual threats? How we live with fear and how we use it to frame our own personal worlds is probably based on our previous experience, but yet I don’t have a actual bug-based trauma in my past, so I think we must also absorb these fears from others and from the media we consume. This goes for bugs, as well as more practical issues such as safety, security and our world views.

And that’s one of the great things about travel. When you leave your comfort zone you are forced to look at the world in different ways. Your frame of reference changes and it challenges you to consider the values and expectations of different people and cultures. What you had taken for granted as an “obvious fact” or “standard norm” is often flipped upside down or tilted sideways or painted in a different light. When you travel you’re often more willing to try new things, eat “strange” foods or take risks (hopefully safe risks) that you wouldn’t have done at home. This is why we travel, and why it’s important to travel. The more you go, the more you learn and the more you grow.

I was really scared when I left for Cape Town, I was really scared when the plane was landing and on my first day of class. But still what I was most scared of is the cockroach in my bathroom.