I was a nineteen-year-old with a tendency to bite off more than she could chew. I was staying in Mbuji Mayi, a rural town in the south-central Democratic Republic of Congo. I had traveled there to make a documentary for a locally-run scholarship program. I was charged with nervous energy throughout the trip. One of the foremost sources of my anxiety was the Congolese law against cameras in public. The Congolese government is unstable, and the large country is extremely divided politically, so the law was enacted in an effort to prevent propaganda that would push the Congo further from unity. I had no intention of making any divisive political propaganda, but I still had to bury my camera equipment deep inside my suitcase and hope that none of the airport personnel pawing through my bags would find it. I remember holding my breath at every security checkpoint.

Despite my years of schooling in French, I’d been dismayed to discover that I could understand almost nothing my host family said. They conversed dizzyingly fast at loud volumes late into the night, their conversations dotted with lilted Tshiluba and other Congolese dialects.

This was an important morning: it was the first day of filming interviews with the students in the scholarship program, an ambitious group of high school-aged girls. I had written and memorized a short speech in French about who I was and what I was doing there. I should mention that I’m terrified of public speaking (even in my native English), so naturally, I was filled with dread.

In typical Congolese fashion, my host family and I were running extremely late—an hour and a half late, to be exact. When we finally arrived at the Lycée Muanjadi, we walked in to a classroom full of eyes: some eager, others wary. My heart raced, and the hot Congolese air felt even more sweltering than usual. The classroom was small, walls covered in chipped sea foam green paint, and packed with people. People standing, people sitting, people laughing and talking and yelling. I felt claustrophobic.

When I was in Mbuji Mayi, I was hyperaware of my whiteness, of my Americanness, of my privilege. Whenever we drove through town, windows down because the car’s air conditioning was broken, the crowds strolling about the streets gave me waves of rolling stares. My host family pointed out to me that I might be the youngest white girl most of the townspeople had ever seen, that I looked like the people in the movies with my pale skin and light hair. As such, I felt a constantly nagging pressure from within myself not to rely on my whiteness to make me worth listening to. I wanted to be more than a white voyeur visiting their community. I wanted to be someone who had come to listen and learn, not to teach and patronize. All of these thoughts swam about in my mind as I stood beside the blackboard that stifling day, waiting.

The time came for me to speak. I began to rattle off my memorized French sentences, pushing myself to speak louder, louder. “I hope to talk to each of you about the problems you perceive in your communities,” I began, “my question for you is: what could be done to improve one local issue close to your heart?” I paused at the end of the first paragraph, and everyone in the room burst into deafening applause. I waited for it to stop. It didn’t. Did they even hear what I said, or were they just applauding because I was an exotic white girl from America who could kind of speak French? The clapping went on and on, seeming to signal the end of the speech I had just begun. I panicked—if they thought I was finished now and I continued to ramble for two more paragraphs, surely they would think of me as some American bigmouth who just couldn’t get enough of her own voice. Scrambling to improvise a plan, I decided to cut straight to the conclusion.

I’d omitted many important details and some key examples of interview topics, and the tropical air felt rife with misunderstanding. The rest of the morning was a disaster. It was chaotic, sticky, hot, noisy. The interviews I had filmed with the students were long and circular, full of cultural disconnects and misinterpreted words. My camera batteries died. By midday, I was thoroughly overwhelmed. I broke down to Sandra, the founder of the scholarship program. She listened, and when I sobbed to her about my awkwardly shortened speech, she stopped me. “Hanna,” she exclaimed, “their clapping wasn’t to tell you to stop speaking! That’s how the Congolese show that they like what you’re saying—it’s normal to have several long rounds of applause during a speech.” I was at once relieved and horrified at my misinterpretation of the audience’s reaction. I was used to streamlined high school assemblies and Christmas choir concerts and National Honors Society induction ceremonies, gatherings of busy, punctual people who preferred to save the palms of their hands for a single pragmatic round of applause. Unbridled, unscheduled clapping was unfamiliar to me.

In rapid-fire French, Sandra explained the confusion to the group of girls surrounding us, mercifully saving me from attempting to explain this small cultural difference in my own clumsy French. I blushed through a spirited round of laughter, embarrassed by my misreading of the situation. As the crowd of students laughed, I tried to gracefully accept my role as the foolish other. Much as I wished I could fit seamlessly into Congolese culture, my foreignness was as loud as the unexpected applause had been. Whether I like it or not, I’ll never be able to erase my American cultural background and replace it with another—sometimes I’ll be the outsider being stared at, and sometimes I’ll be the inconspicuous girl next door.