To 28

I left my country for the first time when I was 14.  Actually, 12, but I’m not sure that I knew that Canada was a separate country.  So at 14, I left, on a school trip to the UK, for which we raised our own money and traveled in packs.

At 19, strolling through Binghamton’s gymnasium, at a c0llege fair, I stumbled across a table advertising studies abroad to Senegal.   I couldn’t have pointed to the country on a map, but the professor was so inviting, and my mind so open, that I immediately applied, was accepted a few months later to the course, and went.

After that was Morocco, for which I applied through Binghamton as well and got a scholarship.  At that point, it felt like no big thang…and yet somehow it was, as  I landed with my enormous Kelty pack, planning to spend 6 weeks.

And then I moved there a year later, the same pack on my back, plus a single suitcase, ready to take on the world.  Later that year, I visited Munich and Prague alone, so content with myself, feeling so well-traveled, so worldly at 23…never stopping to realize that I’d only been to 6 or so countries.

Five years later, and I’m just shy of twenty eight, and in South America for the first time.  Tonight I asked a friend, also from the US and perhaps more well-traveled than I, if he ever imagined as a child that he would travel the world.  He explained that no country feels all that strange anymore, but sometimes, in Madagascar or South Africa, he’ll suddenly have the realization of how far he has come.

I know the feeling.  When I watched The Last King of Scotland, an early scene in which James McEvoy’s character spins the globe and randomly lands on Uganda seriously resonated with me.  I recall, as a young girl, spinning the globe in my room and landing on  strange countries, some of which no longer exist, others of which have been since created from dust.  I still keep a globe in my house at all times. The one I have now is from 1969; and sometimes it pains me to realize that some of the places I once longed to visit no longer exist.

Generally though, I still reflect on my life as incredibly lucky and privileged.  Right now, in the midst of an incredible first trip to South America, specifically to Chile, I keep having these flashbacks of my childhood, these pieces of imagination, remember how desperately I had hoped to see the world, but also how realistically I “knew” that it would never happen.  With my best friend, our senior year of high school, I planned a trip through Europe that would never come to fruition…neither of us had the savings, nor the background to provide the funds, nor the ability to come across them ourselves.  Nevertheless, as adults, we’ve both managed as best we can to fulfill our childhood dreams.

And in this, my 21st country, I am so incredibly thankful for the life that I never imagined I would have.  To 28: being the best year I’ve ever had.