Distrust is a Stone Being Used to Build Walls

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When Biran Tharpa described Couchsurfing as an economy of trusthe unwittingly unearthed a frame that has become increasingly apparent as our travels continued.

The world is a big and there are many humans living their lives, both individually and collectively. It is no stretch of the imagination to accept that, from the mountains of Nepal to downtown San Francisco, most people are just trying to lead a happy existence. Yet during our travels there has been a single voice emanting from people across countries, a voice that transcends cultural and national boundaries yet is intimately tied to them, and that is the voice of distrust.

Danger lurks just beyond the border.

When explaining our onward plans to people we met and stayed with in the US, responses sometimes included warnings about the danger in Mexico. It's a state filled with cartel violence and the US Government has even issued travel warnings about the country, after all. Yet during our stay in each city there would be at least one cop killing of a black or brown person. Throughout February there were a total of 85 people killed by the police and who knows how many more harrased, assaulted, and beaten. Americans were warning us that Mexico is dangerous when America is a nation of people carrying concealed handguns or stocking up on rifles for fear they'll be attacked.

Mexico, though a violent country, for us has proved not to be as dangerous as people suggested. The closest we have come to cartel violence was a shooting on the other side of Puerto Peñasco during our week there. We have hitchiked over 1000 kilometres from Los Mochis to Mazatlán to Guadalajara to Guanajuato and come face to face with little more than a truck driver with a penchant for driving with cocaine and beer. Hitchiking, much like Couchsurfing though even moreso, is a act of mutual trust by both parties. It is not hard to find negative reactions to hitchiking, that only the dross of society sticks their thumbs out, and yet the time we have had chatting broken Spanish to truckers on their third day of driving non-stop have been some of the most genuine moments in Mexico yet.

It was something of an irony then that in Mexico we have been warned of the dangers during our onward travel - even by the truckers we hitched a lift with. Sat in a cab having been picked up off the side of the road on the edge of town, we listened to one driver warn us that Guatemala is a poor country liable to robbery and violence. He has not been the only one. If only they realised, as E pointed out, that those exact words have been said to us about Mexico by Americans.

We were warned about Nepal in India, told that the men there are lazy and the police are corrupt. India remains one of the most socially unequal countries in the world.

Even before leaving the UK I was warned about the horrors of disease in Central and South America, about the liability of violence in Venezeula and Columbia, about the dangers of living outside Britain's healthcare system.

But these words aren't intended with malice. They are words of people that care at least enough to house us, pick us up, and offer what they believe to be good advice. They are not inherently distrustful people. More importantly they have proven to be consistantly incorrect words as each new country has so far brought all but entirely helpful, caring communities; in Guanajuato we were given a bed for two nights by Moro after literally turning up on his doorstep unannounced, for example. Instead they come from a place of manufactured distrust.

One of the most beautiful feelings I have experienced since leaving the UK four months ago yesterday is a running forwards into the unknown knowing that things will resolve themselves in an ultimately positive manner. This is not an attempt to attribute mystical fate or some vague notion of fortune but a growing understanding that trusting in others, accepting that most people are inherently angled towards compassion, allows me - and us - to make decisions that would seem impossible or insane when you are hemmed in by a distrust that comes not even from experience but from hearsay and cultural prejudice.

There is a strong political angle to this manufacture of distrust. It may or may not be too much to say governments and corporations encourage societal distrust for their own ends but it shouldn't be too controversial to say that they certainly don't do much in fighting it. There is too much value in keeping people fixed to their desks or cars, too much power in ensuring people don't realise they can organise themselves beyond the periphery of state and capital. Continue spinning stories about hitchhikers being muggers, rapists, and serial killers or people selling goods on the streets are nothing but con artists or you'll get robbed just wallking down the street at night and you'll lodge distrust like a stone inside people's minds. Black stones that come pouring from mouths at the slightest suggestion of undermining what is socially acceptable. Polished black stones that people gather up and take for their own. Make every person and every society police itself with distrust.

But Couchsurfing, hitchiking, getting fucking lost in city you've never been to half way across the world in a country that speaks a language you cannot - these things are making me realise that trusting myself, trusting E, and trusting strangers is one hell of a way to set fire to the walls that surround us. Everywhere we've travelled has been a contradiction of polished black stones vs angled towards compassion but I hope that our actions in trusting and being trustworthy can contribute, at least a little, to tipping the balance in favour of Biran Tharpa's economy of trust.

This is not a declaration of naïve faith in every person we meet but a criticism of the social rules that often lay hidden just beyond the periphery. There is a moment in the documentary Being in the World when one of the interviewees states that living is a skill and, like other skills, we can refine it through engagement and practice. By bringing to light trust and distrust we, as our travels go on, can refine our discernment through dialogue and action in a way that is not achieved when it remains obfuscated.

"We're told not to travel, and yet we travel."

Also, I have seen nothing but blue skies and sunshine since we hit California in late February. "Hot and sunny. Every single day, hot and sunny." Sorry Niall & Jenn.

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