It has been undeniably strange to have been and to have visitors here these past two weeks—an odd chance to participate in a very different Tanzania than my usual. I was trying to explain this to Benjamin a few days ago—how difficult it has been for me to learn to be a tourist in this country. I think this is what I was trying to say.

Shortly after I had malaria last fall, I went to Mafia Island with Dr. Chilowaka and Jorji, one of the community health workers. My second night on the island, I stayed at one of the tourist lodges—a place with a tile, rather than cracked cement, floor; with crepes for dessert in the evening; with a gorgeous beach and lounge chairs that Tanzanian staff would run up and cover with a woven straw mat and a bolster pillow as you approached. It was a world I’d forgotten existed—as I turned on the air-conditioner that night and went to sleep looking out over the beach, I wondered whether I was still sick and my illness had now progressed to hallucinations.

Standing at the reception—the front of a massive banda, whose rear stretched out to form a shaded terrace, overlooking the sea—as I fished out my wallet to pay $70 to enjoy tile, crepes, and a manicured stretch of sand, I wanted to sink through the floor in humiliation—I couldn’t help but see myself as I must appear to Jorji, who had driven me across the island to the lodge: I felt myself brutally exposed as a fraud, as someone all together different than the Buguruni native I had been pretending to be.

But, while I might have been fooling myself, I don’t think Jorji or any of my other Tanzanian friends were ever really fooled—Jorji hardly batted an eyelash as he climbed back into the Jeep and set back off to the other side of the island. (Although he did later ask me to buy his friend a pair of “original” Timberland boots for Christmas.) What was exposed was not my true material circumstances, the core of me that craved some sort of aesthetic soothing after a month in urban Dar es Salaam, but my own wishful thinking.

You see, I had been living all along with this relatively deluded idea that Jorji—and everyone else I knew in Tanzania—considered me to be one of them. I sputtered along in Kiswahili; I sweated at night inside my cement shack; I carried buckets of water and used squat toilets; I argued with banana vendors—and I had imagined that, living in some sort of approximation of their lives, they would believe me to be no different than they.

It was a bitter realization of my difference, then, as I sat quietly with the curtains blowing in from the sea, eating my crepes, speaking softly in Kiswahili to my waiter. The whole experience stuck in my throat; even as I sat on the beach in the sunrise, sketching the men clambering off the sailboat that brought them out to the island to work in the morning, I kept glancing over my shoulder. It was as though I were a criminal.

I have come to grips with some, although not all, of this in the time since, and playing the tourist still is quite a tricky piece of work for me. But something Beverly told me last year, when I was telling her about how Jorji watched me in that reception area on Mafia as I pulled a stack of bills out of my bag, has stuck with me: that I was never going to be a Tanzanian—I was raised in a suburb in the Midwest of the United States—and it was a good thing for me to know who I was and what I needed to keep myself going.

Because, like it or not, I am not a Tanzanian, and to live here as one for so many months has been a trial at times. I needed that day on Mafia after being in Buguruni—I needed these past two weeks of vacation after being at Olania. I accept that. But still, there are moments when—switching on a fan, climbing out of a swimming pool, getting into a taxi cab—that I suddenly freeze, looking for the exposing flash of a camera, and think to myself: what a fraud.