Why I travel.

Sometimes there are days when all I can think about is home, the little things that are comfortable and familiar and sweet:  My family.  Lying on the couch with my pooch.  Cooking a good Southern breakfast on the weekend.  Ringing my cowbell at a State football game on a crisp fall day.  Family nights spent playing cards or charades with my extended-friend-families.  Summer days spent at the river.  Dear friends that have become part of my family.  Sitting in the pew at FUMC on Sunday mornings...

And then I think about things from my Memphis home, a life that is already in the past:  Walking across Rhodes campus as the sun is setting.  Late night Huey’s cheese fries.  Six roommates crammed into a tiny twin bed.  Lying on my kitchen floor late at night.  Days turned into nights turned back into days spent in the library, the Middle Ground, and Buckman.  The release from Friday afternoon ultimate.  RUF.  An afternoon at Caritas where the stress of the outside world just melts away...

I think about these things and want them so badly.  I wonder why I ever left them behind.  Why couldn’t I stay where life was good and familiar?  Why did I not stay where I know deep love and community?  Why am I constantly forcing myself to pick up my whole self and with few belongings move halfway across the world entirely alone to live with complete strangers who speak a language that is foreign to me and do a job that I have never done before and really don’t know how to do?  Why do I choose to abandon the conveniences of my normal life like the Internet and a Western indoor toilet and electricity that does not shut off at random and a good shower and my car and fresh vegetables and more than five shirts?  Sometimes I cannot help but ask myself: “Why?”

And no matter how difficult a day has been, I always come back to the same answer: “Because I have to…because this is who I am.”  To not explore the world, would be denying myself something that feels very basic to me.  I can’t help but think that if I didn’t leave my home and endure the challenging weeks of misunderstanding, isolation, no Internet, food poisoning, and general village life, maybe I wouldn’t appreciate the sweetness of home quite so much.  Maybe I wouldn’t and couldn’t value every second that I get to spend with my family and friends as much as I do. 

When I stop and take a look around me at the wonder in which I am living, I immediately know why I came.  I see the beauty of the mountains and the sea.  I smell the freshness of the air.  I feel how warmly my host-family and my neighbors treat me as one of their own.  I taste all the wonderful flavors of centuries-long traditions of cultivation, cooking, and wine making.  I hear the sweet calls of “Hello! Hello! Hello!” from my students as I walk down the hallway.  And then I am reminded that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and that I am blessed to have this experience. 

I know that if I did not travel, my wanderlust would eat me alive.  I know that years down the road I would have regret for what I never experienced and wonder what could have been.  I know that it is in my blood to wander and to go and to see and to experience.  I know that (maybe unfortunately, maybe not) my passions lie on two different continents very far away from one another and that I will forever be torn in two different directions.

…

I think about all these things as the days go by in my new Georgian life.  Some days are amazing and some are frustrating, but I try to take the ups with the downs and keep moving forward.  Hours and hours are spent with my host-family and my neighbors and my students.  Walking anywhere without being invited in for coffee is impossible.  Words that were foreign begin to sound a little more familiar.  Teaching English starts feeling more natural.  Cries of “Lizi! Lizi!” from my neighbor baby Andrusha as I walk down the mountain melt my heart.  Time loses all meaning.  The thought of getting somewhere by any means other than marshutka or my own two feet baffles me.  Before I know it, I realize that I have become part of a community, and that when my time here ends, and I return to my forever-home in America, I’ll be leaving behind not a place where I lived but a life and a piece of my heart. 

And that, my friends, is why I travel.