Fear

I am scared of dark, the total blackness. The first night I slept in my hut, it was total darkness absolute. I think I must have turned back on my headlamp and left it on so I could fall asleep. Obviously I couldn’t do that every night, surprisingly I got used to the total darkness night after night and rather like it now.

I was scared of spiders, ants, and caterpillars (especially caterpillars), they give me the creeps. But you can’t keep them out, keep them from falling off your thatch roof, and keep them scaling up and down of your mud wall, so slowly they became my “roommates”. They mind their own business while I do with mine, the best roommates you can have because we leave each other alone, and no conflict arises if neither one of us provoke one and other. I learned to manage my fear of these little critters, and find out that really there is no reason to be scared of them after all.

I was scared of biking alone in the isolated rural area of this strange country, for hours I see nothing but trees, mountains, cows and goats, hear nothing but singing of the birds, occasionally pass some villagers, or another traveler on a motorcycle. I was scared that I can’t scale these mountains on a bike. Never would I have wanted to try mountain biking when I was in the states. But when you don’t have any other alternative, you learn to deal with the situation, especially with the fears that you built up yourself in your head before you know what actually lay ahead. So the first time is extreme grueling physically, but the second time, the third time, then the tenth time, it became more of a routine. I bitch and moan only for the sake of it. And the fear of being a single woman biking through wilderness intercepted by small villages for more than half of a day, which went away also after awhile. I think some of villagers kind of know me by now given the number of times I have made this trip. The best thing to do is greet them, greet them and greet them in their language. I remember not believing an old volunteer telling me that she felt comfortable to just knock on the door of a stranger’s house to stay for the night, if her bike broke down. Two and half years later, I would do the same thing – knock on the door of stranger, if I don’t think I can make it back to my village that day.

Fear comes from not knowing, fear comes from not getting to know and analyze your obstacles. So I learned to take calculated risk to get to know the obstacles that lay ahead, be it physical or mental, and eventually reduce the unnecessary fear that I built up so much in my own head.