Which Country Were You Taught to Fear?

By Neil Solomon · 2 min read

Maybe there is a country that makes you hesitate when someone mentions it. A friend says they are thinking of going, and you feel a small tightening. You may not remember who first told you to be careful.

Picture a woman named Mei who looked for hers. For Mei it was a country she had never visited, and she traced the feeling back to two sources: a news segment she saw when she was nineteen, and a movie. She could not name one person who had lived there.

So she did something small. She wrote the country’s name at the top of a page, and under it she wrote where the fear came from. Then she wrote what she would need to know to replace it with something firmer.

She joined a forum of people who live there and read it for a month. They argued about things she had never thought of: the price of apartments, which neighborhood had the best bakery, whether the buses ran on time. They also warned each other about real risks, specific ones, that she had not known about.

The specific warnings were more useful than the general fear. A general fear says stay away. A specific caution says which district to avoid after dark, which taxi to ring, which scam is common at the airport.

Mei books a week.

Every place has real risks. Every place also has some fears that come from a story and not from anything that happened there. Reading what residents say may help tell the two apart.

Our list is long. If one of the countries on it made you wince, that may be the one to look at first.

You could try Mei’s page. You could write the country, write where the idea came from, and write what you would need to know to hold a firmer one.

This is a piece where the comments are the point. Tell us which country it is and where your idea of it came from. You do not need to say what you found yet. A name and a source are enough. Someone reading may be hesitating over the same name.