Could I die? Maybe
Come on. Seriously?
No? That’s what I thought.
Could I lose all my money?
No.
Will it change my life?
Yes!
Do I have a plan?
Sort of . . .
Am I willing to change it 100 times?
Ehh . . .
Don’t do it!
Wait. Do I tend to overthink things?
Guilty as charged.
Have I ever made a lame excuse not to do something life changing?
Sadly, many times.
Is this one of those excuses?
Okay, you got me.
I’m going for it!
Here is the more nuanced answer. I haven’t done any serious traveling since before college. By serious I mean travel that puts me out of my comfort zone, that challenges me, that puts me in seriously unfamiliar and foreign cultures and forces me to adapt. The last time I did that was the gap year I took between high school and college. I spent chunks of time in France and Mexico (with a few months in DC in between, which is foreign in its own way though not particularly relevant to this discourse).
I went to France for 4 months to work for people I had never met and corresponded with only via letter (yes, letter . . . I’m that old). I spoke no French. Getting to the art school, where I was employed as a cook, housekeeper and occasionally artists’ model, was approximately a 24 hour trip that involved flying from Tucson to Paris, changing airports and flying from Paris to Bordeaux, finding the Bordeaux train station and taking the train to Perigeux, then finding a cab driver to take me from the tiny town of Perigeux to the blink-and-you-miss-it town of St. Martin de Riberac. I had been assured in one of those letters that “all the cab drivers in Perigeux know La Perdrix,” the art school. (In case you speak French and are wondering why an art school would be named The Partridges, it was owned and run by a British couple whose last name was Partridge. Eh, voilà!)
Well. My cab driver had never heard of La Perdrix, but he assured me (at least, I think he assured me. He didn’t speak much English) that we would find it. Pas de problème! Off we went into the French countryside. And went, and went and went. After about 30 minutes I convinced myself that he was really taking me into the woods to do unspeakable things and was pondering what I had at hand that I could use as a weapon. Pen? Could I break one of the mini bottles of booze I had stolen from the cart on the flight to Paris? (I told you I’m that old; the mini booze bottles were actually made of glass). Just then, my driver veered onto the shoulder with nary a building in sight and jumped out of the car. I stared straight ahead, frozen. After about 30 seconds went by and he hadn’t jerked open the back door of the cab to grab me and defile me, I cautiously turned my head towards the road. No sign of the scoundrel. I turned my head towards the shoulder and there, by the back flank of the cab, was my driver relieving himself into the bushes.
We reached St. Martin a few minutes later, at which point my driver slowed down and leaned on his horn. When women began to poke their heads out of their houses wondering what the commotion was about, he asked them, “Où est La Perdrix?” Remarkably for such a tiny village, we had to ask several people before one pointed us up a side street.
And there I was, off on my grand adventure. I cooked, I cleaned, I hitchhiked to Spain and back with my coworker during our week off between courses. I was full of fear and trepidation and I did it anyway and it was glorious. In Andorra, we got a ride from a group of Spaniards who were heading to kayak races in the mountains. They told us that if we came and cheered them on they would feed us and find us a ride to Barcelona. After a beautiful day lounging in the Pyrenees and watching the races they fed us on wine, cheese, melon, and grilled meats until we could barely move and then found us a ride with a man who had no legs. His car was specially modified so he could control the pedals with his feet. He even offered to let us stay with him in Barcelona, but we chickened out and got a hotel room instead (honestly, what exactly did we think he was going to do to us?)
I finished with a week in Paris, staying my French relatives whom I had never met before and reconnecting with a high school friend who was studying theater. By the time I got on a plane to return to the U.S. I had grown in confidence and worldliness far out of proportion with the few months I had been gone. I was ready to take on the world.
I finished the gap year with three months in Morelia, Michoacán where I lived with a family who spoke no English at all. Luckily, I had studied Spanish in school since I was in the second grade. But I had never had to speak Spanish. I had to overcome my fear of not saying everything perfectly if I wanted to, say, eat. Or wash my clothes. Or get directions to the post office. Or anything, really.
I worked for a crazy man. People ask me what he did and to this day the answer is, I don’t know. I clipped newspaper articles about the upcoming presidential election (Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was running as a the first serious challenger to the PRI in 40 years—exciting times!) and tried to figure out his bizarre filing system that had filled six or seven large filing cabinets over many years. Whatever I did, it was invariably wrong and led to a lengthy discourse on how incompetent I was. I know now that this was because old Roberto was crazy, but I didn’t recognize it at the time. I was lonely and scared and I cried a lot. My parents told me numerous times that I didn’t have to stay.
But I did stay because when I wasn’t working for crazy Roberto I was exploring the incredible state of Michoacán —alone and with the son of the family I was staying with, José Alfredo Samuel Lopez-Juarez. (No, really. And it was very important to him that I know the whole name which is why, to this day, I remember it.) I went to Lake Pátzcuaro and some of the surrounding towns, each of which specializes in a particular craft: wool weaving (Pátzcuaro), straw weaving (Tzintzúntzan), copper working (Santa Clara del Cobre), wood carving (Quiroga). I joined the family I lived with on their annual trek to a small town in Guanajuato where their relatives lived for Semana Santa. I helped an ancient woman make tamales unlike any I’ve ever had or seen since—blue corn masa spread thin and covered in red bean paste, then rolled like a jelly roll and cut into rectangles—in a tiny kitchen with a dirt floor and a single bare bulb. I watched the entire village reenact the crucifixion and the Stations of the Cross on Easter Sunday, with a man dressed as Jesus wearing a crown of thorns and being whipped by centurions. I rode a tiny pony to Paricutín, the volcano that erupted in the 40s, with a guide who was a little boy when it happened and who was able to show me where his house had been in the ruins of the town that was overrun with lava.
All of these experiences were on one level terrifying. But getting over that terror and doing it anyway . . . I look back at those experiences as some of the best of my life, in the sense that they were fun and amazing but also because I learned more about myself and what I can do if I take chances and challenge myself.
Well that was quite a long journey to the present, wasn’t it? So here I am, about 2 months ago. And suddenly I want to travel, seriously travel again. I mean, I am getting the itch something fierce. I’m moody and broody and every couple of days I’m saying things to Theresa like, “Let’s sell the house and join the Peace Corps.” And she’s saying things like, “No.”
I’m not a big believer in “the universe” as an active character in one’s life and I don’t believe in a deity. But right about the time I was going to join the circus or have myself committed, a friend sent out an invitation on Facebook for a slideshow by a man who lives and works in Nepal. “Interesting,” I thought. And, “Well, at least that will be one night that I won’t be hatching plans to sell all my possessions and become a monk in Burma.” That was about as far as my thought process went.
The man was Scott McClellan and his organization is The Mountain Fund. They do incredible humanitarian work on a shoestring budget. And they take short term volunteers. Most of their volunteers go on the annual medical trek but I was captivated by a different program. They teach Nonviolent Communication to women who are living with domestic violence as a way to help them diffuse some of the violence in their lives. This dovetails with two of my interests: all the work I have done with victims of domestic violence over the years and my growing interest in conflict resolution. I emailed Scott the next day and he wrote back immediately, telling me that although they do not ordinarily take short term volunteers for that program he would find work for me.
So back to the question. Why? Because it will allow me to travel. To seriously travel. To get out of my head, out of my familiar milieu, to challenge my assumptions about myself and learn something about a part of the world I know virtually nothing about. Because I am 41 years old and at a standstill. I’m not having children and I’m not clear that I’m really doing anything meaningful with my life. The woo-woo way of putting it is that I am traveling half way around the world hoping to find myself (or at least a clue to where to find the breadcrumbs that will lead to a path that I want to be on).
I am happy to say that there is some science to back up my methodology and that of countless seekers before me. How travel makes us smarter: "The same details that make foreign travel so confusing--Do I tip the waiter? Where is this train taking me?--turn out to have a lasting impact, making us more creative because we're less insular. We're reminded of all that we don't know, which is nearly everything; we're surprised by the constant stream of surprises."
Why? Because at the very least I’ll see some amazing things and meet some incredible people and grow. And why wouldn’t I want to do that?
