Fourteen Countries Later — The Gift of Returning

Since now and the last time I’ve written for this blog, I’ve visited fourteen countries. Perhaps I should add travel blogging to my mausoleum of failures.

Traveling is exciting to live but not very fun to write about. The last thing I want to do after a botched 8-hour Giza Pyramids tour, where my guide sighed every time I wanted a photo and refused to stop for lunch, is to write a do’s and don’ts blog post about how to avoid my horrible experience. It’s a good thing I created this blog as a passion project, where I can take a two-year hiatus if I feel like it.

What I really wanted this space to be used for was to share my work in the humanitarian field, talk about my thoughts about the world and all the things I see in it. I’ve been told before I should start a podcast. I’ve got a messy mind with a lot of opinions. My words often fail me though in the moments that matter most, unable to say what I mean in the right way. So, maybe that’s why every time I get on here to write . . . I don’t.

I recently moved back to Jordan, a place that has always been special to me. It was the first place I ever traveled to on my own. I used to go to this coffee shop on my street every morning and get the same salted caramel latte order. It was to the point where when I walked through the door, the barista already was starting my order. Then, I would hail a taxi to my internship. I felt so much pride building little routines in a new country. These felt like big steps for twenty year old me.

And yet, that same girl never explored the park that was apparently right around the corner from her house. She barely hung out with the other students in the program. She also hid upstairs in her room most days too scared to go down and socialize with her host family, utterly convinced they hated having her there. She left Jordan with so much shame that she couldn’t just be confident like other people when they traveled. I’m an introvert and it has taken me a while to realize travel is for me too. I don’t have to be anything other than who I am.

Now, I’m standing back on that street (with a salted caramel latte in hand, of course) and a lot of life has passed between then and now. I just made the decision to walk into my host family’s pottery shop. The bell rang. They let me in. In a much more elegant way, they assured me that they never hated me. All that shame I carried for three years melted away.

I could have kept walking. I did consider it. Then, I thought about how in just one week, I went from no plan, to spontaneously applying to a grad program for the following year, to getting in and being told they could fit me in this year but I needed to book a flight and be in Jordan in three weeks. I wasn’t sure if I could financially make it work. I also considered staying and deferring to the following year. Turns out my unemployment benefits ended the day I landed in Jordan. Imagine if I had stayed?

A whole lot of suddenly’s brought me there that can’t be explained away as a coincidence – pushing me towards healing I didn’t think I could have. Most people don’t often get the privilege of visiting a country more than once. Now, I found myself back in Jordan, with the same university, doing a very similar style program. On the ride to Wadi Rum, I was gazing out the window and thinking about how crazy it is that I’m heading to the very same desert camp I stayed at year’s ago. However, this time everything was different.

In the van with me were seven other girls. My classmates who had become my best friends and we were disgustingly inseparable. I never had strong female friendships during my undergrad. I was casually texting my mom about my day, when this was something I couldn’t do for the past three years. And it hit me – how you can walk in the same place, with the same people, or in the same circumstances and yet it can be completely made new. Transformed.

Perhaps that is one of the many gifts travel has given me that is worthy of making it in a blog post. Nothing is beyond restoration. I’m so grateful to be standing exactly where I was three years ago.