Bi-Polar Travel

To see babies with distended bellies, visit orphans pulled from sewage pits, and go on to Safari through the Serengeti clearly requires cognitive dissonance. But it is only different from our everyday dissonance in that it has to be actively addressed.

It is no mystery that there is poverty in the world, no surprise that there is suffering. The question is even old. Yet travel makes more pressing: what will be done?

By traveling through these regions, I see answers are arriving, some already in action. Dennis and Morris are brothers from Gulu, Uganda who volunteer every night to watch over the night commuters who sleep at Charity for Peace. The kids are there to avoid abduction from their rural homes. Charity for Peace is not able to provide dinner, snack, or breakfast to the children, who go straight to school from the center, but they can provide a safe spot to sleep. Dennis and Morris educate the kids about health and hygiene, sports, and responsibility.

Father Don is a Catholic Priest from Cleveland, Ohio who has traveled to Gulu for a third time to work on a book about child soldiers and to continue the awareness-raising he’s been doing in Catholic communities and throughout the Cleveland area. When he’s in Gulu he stays at St. Monica’s, a convent and girls school that, under the leadership of Sister Rosemary, has also created a safe space and opportunity for a meal for night commuters from nearby villages. They’d like to see the international community focus on Northern Uganda like it’s recently focused on the Darfur region of Sudan.

Charles is a secondary school student sponsored by Invisible Children. After school, he walks several miles to find water for bathing. After bathing, he studies as long as possible with natural light, and after that with paraffin. Despite having lost both parents and sharing a small one-room hut with another boy, he is finishing school. He is doing his work to support hope for the future in Gulu.

James is a former Merrill Lynch investment banker who, after visiting an orphanage in Kampala, Uganda, quit his London – New York job and lifestyle to volunteer full-time with the children. He’s now in his second year in Kampala. He’s balanced the books, increased revenue from sustainable sources, and developed conservation systems such as collecting rainwater for washing. The revenue from a guest house and the rain water system both serve to drive down the amount of funding needed from outside, and more substantially guarantee that the toddlers have adequate food, clothing, and bedding.

Joseph used his university degree in agriculture to improve the lot of farmers in his original home area of Kagera, Tanzania. He and his staff have taught farmers value-added production techniques, such as drying pineapple and banana, that allow for longer storage, easier shipping, and enhanced value.

Charl is a seventy-year-old Episcopal Deacon from Oil City, Pennsylvania. A few years ago she made her first trip to Africa and, aside from one visit to London when her son was stationed there, her only trip outside the United States. In the Episcopal Church Deacons are charged with being the voice and ears of the church in the world, and are taught to follow Christ’s example of service. A day before she left Tanzania Charl found out that she could help a boy in the hospital get daily access to milk for four months if she gave $20.

The children in the hospital typically get only fortified porridge, unless they or their families are able to pay the supplemental costs for milk. When the kids get milk they gain weight and grow. Charl gave $370 before she left, to sponsor several more kids. When she got home she started the Milk Fund, a program that now guarantees that all children under five will get milk as they recover at the Nyakahanga Hospital.

The Milk Fund has done much beyond that, and Charl is now on her third visit here. She says as a Deacon she does not believe the ideas were hers, but rather were divinely ordained. It is clear, from seeing the hospital here, from talking with the doctors, and from learning about other efforts like the ones listed above, that – divinely inspired or not – we all have the power to save, fortify, extend, enable, inspire, support life. That is Godly power. And we are more aware of it through traveling.

Usually our dissonance allows us to forget not only the issues that need our attention, but also the improvements that are within our grasp. Traveling through a region, staying with locals, going by bus – is enticing, alluring, exciting. It also gives life to problems and solutions on the ground. That traveling is selfish is certain, but like many selfish things it brings social benefits.

Joseph – the value-adding agriculturalist, entrepreneur and community-supporter from Kagera, Tanzania – says international visitors challenge and educate locals, just by being there, necessarily embodying a different worldview, offering an alternative. That’s why Joseph is proud that he has a Kenyan and a Ugandan on the staff of his local nonprofit organization.

Linda, a professor who annually leads American college students on a course in rural Tanzania (www.globalservicelearning.org), gives local speakers an opportunity to ask questions of the students after the students have peppered them with queries. Often, more is revealed in what Tanzanians want to know about the states than in Tanzanian answers to questions Americans think must be important.

Travel challenges perspectives. Men hold hands in East Africa – as friends. Children are fantastically happy – through seemingly unbearable struggles. Women in the region of Kagera, Tanzania are told to be silent – during childbirth. And travel reveals universals – flirtation implicit in indigenous dance in the Andes Mountains; eroticism explicit in Jamaican Independence Day parades; courting, commitment, questions about kids, family, home.

They hear from us, we learn from them. Connections are made, children are sponsored, the dissonance becomes less bearable. People go home – with friends abroad – and want to do more. Being born in a particular spot in the world shouldn’t necessarily give you two times the life expectancy of your fellow human beings on the other side of the globe. And as more of us travel we are more aware that current fact must change, more educated about ways we may all change it, and more committed to doing so.