In a little over six months, I'll be hopping on a plane with 16 girls and four teachers I've never met to South America for three and a half months with no phones, no computers, and no electronics. With only a frame pack and a day pack, stuffed full with malaria pills, on-the-go water filters, iodine pills, hiking poles, rain pants, bug spray, and other outdoor equipment that honestly, I have no idea how to use.
Why?
"I beg young people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food, dig some interesting people, have an adventure, be careful. Come back and you're going to see your country differently. You're going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It's not what Tom Friedman writes about, I'm sorry. You're going to see that global climate change is very real. That for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can't get out of a book that are waiting for you at the end of that flight. A lot of people—Americans and Europeans—come back and go, "Ohhhhhh." And the lightbulb comes on." - Henry Rollins
That's why.
I'm going because I want to see how the rest of the world lives outside of the excess of the United States. I want to hear a child from a rural village in Ecuador joke with me in Spanish and Kichwa. I want to see first hand what United States' policies are doing to other regions of the world. I want to eat different foods. I want to hear the hum of the Amazon jungle swell up around me as I try to fall asleep in my tent. I want to push myself. But most of all, I want to learn. Not out of a textbook in a brick classroom in rural Tennessee, but from the people and the cultures surrounding me. Because that's the kind of learning that doesn't stop after high-school, after college. So I'm going to South America for three and a half months to have adventures with people I've never met. And I know that I'll be happier than ever when I return.
"Blessed are the curious, for they shall have adventures."
