On Travel, Geographic and Virtual

Exactly six months and one week ago, I sat in a plane and watched Accra recede.

I reflected on how, over the course of three weeks, our first group of student travelers vacillated between glee, newness, awe, and unmitigated enthusiasms, well as moments of exhaustion, homesickness, and questioning. They marveled at the connectedness of people in communities and their willingness to help and support their neighbors and welcome foreigners, while at the same time they struggled to process the occasional tourist-seller relationships that were relegated to simple transactions. They also reveled in the birth of baby goats, the learning opportunities, the impact of shifting musical paradigms, and the welcome and attention from the phenomenal staff at the Dagara Music Center. They played countless hand clapping games with school children and had their hair “braided” by 4-year-olds more times than they could count. While bashing around the Kintampo Falls, one of the students opened a closed fist and said, “Look! I found a bug!” and it occurred to me that the powerful impact of exposure to new geography, people, and cultures was not just confined to the obvious and traditional manifestations of culture shock. Beauty and discovery is its own form of culture shock, wherever it appears.

We also experienced culture shock upon our return, as we explored privilege through new lenses. Grocery stores are overwhelming after three weeks with a locally-based cuisine, and the “buy local” ethic stamped all over Whole Foods seems incomplete when it is only one option among many, and only those with disposable income are generally able to take advantage of it. Global inequality became more clearly defined and more real to our students during these travels.

Sometimes, travel seems easier after returning home, when the pictures speak the truth of excitement, ruggedness, and magical experience, and gloss over the challenges, and the risks of confronting who you are and what you believe you need in a context so foreign. It is the challenges, however, that create openings, and this is why we travel. It is to come home changed. But this active perspective-shifting that comes with travel is a privilege, as well, one that inspires both a need for continuing perspective-shifting, and recognition that we have the luxury of asking for it and seeking it out, when many of those we left behind (and many back home) do not have the same opportunities.

Each of us came back from Ghana transformed to some degree, and we are still only beginning to comprehend those changes. We might not ever fully understand what this kind of travel experience did for us, but my hope is that it will help us to ask better questions. I hope that the echoes of this trip will allow us to occasionally reframe the familiar, to check and make sure that our perspective continues to function as one of many options, rather than as an unexamined truth. I hope that we can use these lessons to participate in the building of a more just world. It is easy to forget the power of these experiences when the press of daily living and future aspirations close in on us. But if we exist only within the context of our normal lives, we miss out on connections to the fact that we are in this world, and that it is far deeper and more complex than our personal realities will ever allow us to comprehend.