going back.
I am participating in #Trust30, an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.
Prompt #5: If we live truly, we shall see truly. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Not everyone wants to travel the world, but most people can identify at least one place in the world they’d like to visit before they die. Where is that place for you, and what will you do to make sure you get there?
(Prompt by: Chris Guillebeau)
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A freckled riot I was at 16. Bright red hair, long and thick down my back. For some reason I chose a Big Bird colored yellow one-piece jumpsuit to wear on my first airplane flight ever. I was visible for miles, that yellow and that red. It is difficult to use the restroom on a plane when encased in a bright yellow one-piece jumpsuit. Or a jumpsuit of any color.
Tall and thin, I boarded a plane in North Carolina, landed in New York, then boarded another plane bound for Sri Lanka. It was a country that until a few weeks earlier, I had never heard of. Now I was to be an exchange student there, living with a Sinhalese family.
It changed my life, being there. Living in a small village, attending school at Museus Buddhist Girls' College, apprenticing in a batik factory, having tea and small eats with neighbors in the afternoons, eating rhombutans. Seeing how people live who don't have cars and iPads and everything we believe we need to be happy. Especially at 16 when we believe we will die if we don't get a car to drive.
It is the experience I point to as a changing point in my life, for many reasons. Not the least of which was the recognition that while these people around me in Pita Kotte where vastly different from me in many ways, in all the ways that counted, they were me. We were the same.
I have since traveled to over 60 countries, visiting every continent except Antarctica. There are many places I would still like to see (if I weren't intensely interested in staying home these days), and some I would love to see again, like Split and Munich and Hod Ha-sharon, but none I would like to revisit as much as Sri Lanka.
It will happen in 2012, the 36th anniversary of my first going there. Somehow.
