Condoms and Clippers

We were all having these local beers back then—things like Tusker, Kilimanjaro, and, when we were lucky, Guinness Foreign Extra. So, if I had to guess what we were drinking when we started talking about the nail clippers, it was probably a pack of one of those. Or maybe a bottle of this stuff called "Zappa," a radioactive-looking sambuca that had achieved what felt like total brand penetration across Tanzania's safari towns. We were in the largest of them, Arusha, where our organization was headquartered, just a drive from the Serengeti, the Ngorongoro crater, and Mount Kilimanjaro itself, depending on which direction you headed.

I don't remember exactly how the clippers came up, but it was probably because we were talking about grooming. Grooming was a major theme for us that summer. It was, for most of the group, the first extended period we’d ever gone without running water or free-flowing electricity. These circumstances seemed to activate in us some new sense of experimentation—necessity is the mother of invention, I suppose. For my part, I took the opportunity to grow a beard for the first time, which was thrilling yet terrible-looking. Over the course of the trip, our grooming misadventures just became this funny sort of thing.

Really, it was a funny sort of thing that we were there, in Tanzania, at all. It was an important time for the country: Its young people—like my roommate, Alex, a Tanzanian college student—were rising as the next generation of activists, rallying in the hopes of a future that they could chart together. Meanwhile, Tanzania's elders, like my host, our homestay baba—a remarkable man who’d climbed, literally, from the tunnels of the Tanzanite mines to become the mwinikiti, the chair of his village—were concerned with another kind of power, meeting with Chinese envoys to broker infrastructure investments and mineral rights deals. We were just there to talk about sex.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of H.I.V. infection in the world. The organization I was with, an N.G.O. that's since shut down, was one of many focused on eradicating the virus by educating communities around safe sex practices and equipping people with resources like condoms. What I appreciated about our organization was that, unlike most of these groups, it was run by locals, and we were all very clear about our role as the American college students: We were marketing assets. Our Tanzanian colleagues were smarter and more capable than we were, but having some cheerful young wazungu in the mix seemed to add a bit more oomph to the operation.

They posted us in these rural villages surrounding cities like Arusha and Babati. We'd speak to classrooms or town meetings, where the general message was always the same: Here's how H.I.V. is transmitted; here's how to prevent it; here's how to use a condom. The questions, though, were always a surprise, stuff like: "What would happen to me if I got vaginal fluid in an open wound?" This was all translated with a lot of grace by our Tanzanian colleagues.

When we weren’t working or crapping our pants, we were hanging out, getting to know our homestay families and the characters who'd come for the work. Some weeks, we'd meet up in one of the larger cities or towns to commiserate with the volunteers who'd been placed in farther-flung villages, too remote to see on our normal rounds. We'd talk about the work, of course, but mostly we'd goof around, enjoy being teenagers in an exciting new place, and chat.

One night, one of the volunteers started talking about his uncle.

“I’ve got this uncle in Japan,” he explained. “Out of the blue, he was like, ‘I’m gonna send you something in the mail.’ So , I was like, ‘Awesome what’s it going to be?’ I thought it was going to be clothes or something cool.”

“What was it?” Someone asked.

“I got it, and it was just this... pair of nail clippers. I was like, ‘Whaaaaat the heck?’ But I talked to my uncle, and he was like, “Dude, trust me.’ And you know what? He was right.”

“What do you mean?” 

“He was like, ‘These are gonna change your life.’ And they legit have. It’s not like any other pair of nail clippers you’ve ever used. These Japanese nail clippers are just incredible.”

“How so?”

“Like, the cut is just so smooth. It’s effortless. They get it so clean every time. So, now, I’m saying to you: ‘Trust me.’ Get some Japanese nail clippers, and you won’t regret it.”

It was the oddest thing. That conversation, one that I'm sure nobody else ever thought about again, planted an idea deep in the back of my mind. Among all the other, much more straightforwardly life-changing experiences and memories from that summer, that little anecdote somehow stuck with me.

Nearly a decade later, I went to Japan for the first time. Despite exploring the coolest shopping districts on the planet and realizing several childhood dreams in visiting some museum-grade video game stores, I came back to the U.S. with exactly one souvenir: a pair of Japanese nail clippers that I'd spotted while shopping around a random grocery store in a neighborhood that I can't even remember. And, you know what? They're even better than I'd imagined. The cut is smooth and effortless, and they get it so clean each and every time.