Learning, Seeing, Connecting: Addicted to Travel

Curiosity, among incessant travelers, is a core hunger. It forces you out the door, around the bend, over the ridge. Stories draw you further forward and tease you into action. I remember a child’s book I read in 3rd grade, about a young man’s tours of the United States on motorcycle. My mother was soon horrified to learn I wanted to grow up to be, just like the man in the book, a gypsy.

In college my international relations instructor, Dr. Farley, a man who has lived in dozens of countries, under communists, capitalists, and totalitarians, told us that we must spend a semester abroad; that it would be the easiest time in our lives to do so; that it would change us, shape us, mold us. During my semester in Scotland my flat mates wanted to know why I hadn’t seen all the states had to offer. Later that year I found myself pounding across the country with two cousins, reading On the Road.

Kerouac’s description of the Rockies rising out of the plains, from humble bump to towering fortress, pushed me to paste the pedal to the floor and squint all the way through Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado. At last the mountains appeared, inspiring awe, humble reverence, and pure carnal rage. It’s been the same for me in the Andes: true mountains tap directly into deep wild nature; they house Gods and are Gods. They can do good or ill, at least according to many Andean religions. That is what I felt in Eastern Colorado – a connection to a set of communities I would only meet through future travel; an intuitive appeal to their spirituality and worldview that I would learn about later.

Then of course, like Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley, it sticks: “the sound of a jet engine, four hoarse blasts of a ship’s horn, even the clop of shod hooves on pavement… sets my heart to racing and stands the hair on my neck on end… in other words, once a bum, always a bum.”* Travel is a sly narcotic, working its way not into a physical addiction in your veins, but plowing into the depths of your mind, invading the forgotten cavities of your heart, and becoming a full-blown habit of necessity.

It taught me that snow-capped mountains hug the equator in Ecuador. It has provided me with a deeper understand of my own language, thrown me into bits of Italian, forced me to improve my Spanish, whisked me into Quechua, and introduced me to many other tongues. It forced me to stop stereotyping Germany, a beautiful land of wonderful people that have gotten a gray and totalitarian rap in the history books. It pushed me quite accidentally into a brothel in Bolivia and allowed me quite deliberately to sample a grub in the Amazon. It’s made me consider and reconsider, drop univeralsisms and prop them up again. It’s made me dizzy, and it continues to promise insight.

In that, Dr. Farley was right, travel educates. It educates the traveler about new people and places and it informs foreign communities about travelers. It can build bridges and bring people closer together. That, I believe, is desperately needed in the world, and is another core reason for my travel.

Africa is at times referred to as the Dark Continent. And what news Americans do see from there is grim, if not grotesque. Ethiopia’s 1984 famine is one of my first memories of Africa, starving children beamed around the world to our televisions screens. “Just give,” the commercials said, “and you will save a child’s life. It’s that simple.” We gave. We sponsored children. My family got cards describing our kids around the world. I don’t know what eventually happened with it. I don’t know what happened with them, but we do know now that it wasn’t that easy.

Resource scarcity has been a tremendous problem, but the core issues are deeper: colonial governments forming states where none existed still yield ethnic conflicts among people who did not intend to govern together; Cold War efforts by the Soviets and the States flooded the region with arms for the simple sake of adding one more name to either bloc; and sky-high interest rates on International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans crippled governments from taking real steps to offer basic education and social service opportunities.

Civil War was common. The now-infamous 1994 Rwandan Genocide, in which over 800,000 people were killed in four months, bordered Western Tanzania. East of Kenya, the Somali capital of Mogadishu was the setting for the events that inspired the film Black Hawk Down, about US attempts at humanitarian intervention there in 1992. Northwest of the city I’ll be staying in in Uganda, Gulu, a rebel army has harassed villagers and government troops for seventeen years. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is fighting to implement a society based on a strict interpretation of the Ten Commandments, and to do so they are abducting children from villages to fight at their sides. But I am jumping ahead: those children are a good part of the third reason for my trip.

Before I discuss the child soldiers though, back to the second reason for the trip – travel gives an opportunity to see and share the things that are beautiful around the world. Africa is not all dark, and I’ll be able to better explain to others the treasures of East Africa: the beaches of Zanzibar, the endless wonders of a Serengeti Safari, the taste and texture of Ethiopian cuisine, and Hemingway’s old haunts around Mt. Kilimanjaro. I’ll work on putting into words what happens when Swahili culture and Indian and Arabic design mingle in the structure of buildings along the east coast. I’ll meet people, learn their human stories and experiences, and share mine with them. Less than twenty-five percent of Americans hold passports and, in college study abroad experiences, less than three percent of American students travel to Africa. So I go to try to build bridges, to respect the idea that we are all equally human and, if we continue to work and hope together, we may one day live in a world that actually values each of us equally.

That idea – the simple commitment to the value of human life – is a core part of the reason that many young Americans have been gathering in Gulu. They are there, working with the organizations Invisible Children (www.invisiblechildren.org), UgandaCan (www.ugandacan.org), and the Africa Project. Together, they are all raising awareness about the plight of child soldiers in Northern Uganda and providing increased access to education for former child soldiers. In Gulu children walk from their villages to the town center every night, so that they can sleep in hospital basements or under pavilions in parks, under the watchful eye of the government troops. They fear sleeping at home because the LRA rebels come to steal children in the night, taking them immediately away and quickly initiating them with such bald acts of violence as forcing a group of girls to step on an arbitrarily chosen group member until she dies.

They are forced to fight for the rebels. Attempts at escape meet torture and death. This is the area where I’ll be for the longest amount of time. I’ll be interviewing the kids and putting their stories together; working to bring more information to the outside world so that pressure can be put on the government and the rebels to resolve this conflict peacefully. There has been some, limited, reason for hope since the government of Sudan recently responded to international pressure to make greater efforts toward peace in Darfur. The same approach may work in Northern Uganda as well.

I’ll also be interviewing the other young Americans there. I’m seeing a great surge in interest in service and activism that focuses on Africa, and I want to know more about what’s motivating people, what their commitments are, and what their vision is.

I think part of the reason they’re there is the simple gut-level commitment one human can feel toward another. Deep down, they know national identity is one of the last morally accepted forms of outright discrimination, and they know that doesn’t make sense. We no longer suggest that it’s OK to treat African Americans or Jews differently, or that women or Hispanics ought not to have rights, but we continue to simply accept fundamentally massive global differences in life expectancy, access to education, access to healthcare, and simple freedom from arbitrary harm – that most fundamental individual right.

So, they’re traveling around the world to make a difference and I want to know what drives them too.

• I’m doing this quotation on the road, from memory, so it’s bound to be somewhat imperfect.