A recent report by Dana Scarton, "Obsessive-Compulsives Follow Psychologist...," gives an interesting glimpse into some aspects of obsessive-compulsive disorder and its treatment. Here, specifically, we read about people overcoming their fears of contamination by mustering the courage to touch a public toilet (and lick their hands afterward!), handle nasty garbage, or shake hands with a homeless person; or to conquer their paralyzing uncertainties by passing through a gantlet wielding a knife.
There's always something new and surprising in the world, it seems. But if these exercises, conducted by a psychiatrist, work to help people overcome irrational fears, no doubt they are worth the apparent eccentricity.
From time to time during my professional travels to distant corners of the world, I encountered odd foods or sometimes issues of contamination similar to those the OCD victims in the article were dealing with. These chance collisions with unaccustomed aspects of foreign cultures are far from OCD, but the successful traveler learns to deal with them. Or some don't, like a visitor to Turkey I observed who, even in an elegant, white-tablecloth restaurant, couldn't face the prospect of eating a fish -- a nicely grilled, fresh fish -- because its head was attached.
Maybe all world travelers learn to deal with these things in different ways, or maybe in the same way. I wasn't brought up to be adventurous in diet or experience, but somewhere early in my independent life I somehow decided that if the local people ate it, touched it, breathed it, or lived through it, I could too. So I can't recall anything I hesitated about: shaking hands with lepers; having a nibble of singed dog; eating the lamb's eye; buying meat from a butcher outdoors in a market who would lop your chosen section off a carcass exposed to dust and flies; drinking rice beer from a common bowl with Vietnamese Montagnards whose living conditions made tuberculosis prevalent ... all these "tests" and others went by and I'm still here to tell the tale.
None of them was any worse than having to eat a stick of raw celery. Ick!
DO DO DO.... THE ONE DESIRE,DON'T WANNA HEAR YOU SAY.....
Posted by: Supra Skytop | February 16, 2011 at 03:55 AM