Checking a Fear, Step by Step
Picture a man named Joel. For years, people have told him that a certain country is dangerous. He has never been there. When he mentions it to a friend, the friend winces. One evening he decides to check.
He starts with numbers. He finds the rate of violent offenses per 100,000 residents for the city he might live in, and he puts it beside the rate for his own city and for an American city he has visited without a second thought. Then he looks at neighborhoods, because a city is not one number. The two rates may match the picture in his head or they may not. What matters is that both are in the same units.
He adds one more line for comparison: how many people die by accident in his own country. In the United States, it is about 58 to 67 deaths per 100,000 people a year, depending on the year and on what is counted. In recent years, the homicide rate was below 1 per 100,000 in Portugal and Spain and about 2 to 3 in Thailand. In Mexico and Colombia, it was about 25. Even there, accidents at home are about two and a half times as common as murders. These are national averages from public sources, and they hide a great deal. Risk varies by neighborhood and by person, and accidents happen in every country, with road deaths often higher abroad. So Joel looks at his own city’s numbers too.
Then he reads and watches what people who live there post. Not travel writers. Residents. They write about rent, about schools, and about which streets they avoid at night.
The numbers do not describe daily life in a place. They give a first, rough answer, enough to decide whether a trip is worth planning.
The next step is a plan on paper. He picks a city, a neighborhood and a place to stay. He picks three things to do, and one day to do nothing at all. The country has been a name for years. After an hour of planning it is a set of streets.
The third step is the trip, and on the trip he talks to people who live there. Not only the staff at his hotel or the guides at the tourist sites. He talks to the woman who runs the shop on his block. He sits with a taxi driver for twenty minutes. He asks two questions. What do you like about living here? And what do you avoid?
The second question is the useful one. A general fear says stay away. A specific answer tells him which district to skip after dark, which taxi company to call and which trick is common at the airport.
Joel comes home with a more detailed picture than he started with. There are parts he would avoid and parts he loved. He does not say the country is free of risk. He says here are the three neighborhoods I would look at first, and here is what I would do differently.
You might say numbers can mislead. They can. That is why there are two more steps.
You could try this with the place you were told to fear. You could look up the numbers, plan a trip on paper, and talk to a few people who live there.
The cost of a place is one number you can find on our calculator. Risk is another number, and it needs the same kind of looking.
Which place were you told to fear, and what did the numbers say when you looked? Tell us in the comments. Someone reading may be about to look for the first time.
Tell us in the comments