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Why We Travel: Mark Shrime’s Story

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All it took was a nun.

The flight from New York City to Paris and on to Benin was about as uneventful as flights go; maybe half an hour of turbulence and two complimentary glasses of cognac rocked the entire sixteen hours of travel. Until I landed in Benin, the only thing eventful that had happened to me was that, despite my best efforts, I thoroughly and completely lost an armrest war to my left-hand neighbor, who seemed to consider that his window-seat ticket also bought him a controlling share in the adjacent aisle seat.

Given that he was approximately double my size (you will see…this promises to be a recurring theme), I’m surprised I lasted as long as I did—which, to be fair, was only about 27 minutes. I had little choice but to become intimately familiar with the contralateral armrest, and each passing, just-wide-enough-to-make-you-rue-elbows, duty-free-stocked beverage cart propelled by plastic smiles.

All this changed, though, on arrival at Cotonou’s Cadjehoun airport. Miles more developed than Monrovia’s airport, Cadjehoun has regimented lines with regimented passport agents sitting at actual, regimented desks behind actual, regimented plastic, with actual stamps, making actual, official, stamp-like sounds.

It’s a thin veneer.

Evidently passport confiscations are de rigeur here; my kindly, smiling, official-sounding passport agent conveniently “couldn’t find” my passport after she sent me aside to fill out an arrivals form (the first attempt being deemed subpar). She was sure she’d given it back to me. I must have just misplaced it.

My refusal to believe her led to a swift surrounding by three other very kindly and official-sounding passport agents, reminding me that—don’t you know?—they were police officers and would be sure to deal with me as police officers do, merci beaucoup. Thankfully, the bluster didn’t last long, and some well-placed obstreporousness aided the magical reappearance of my passport.

A little shaken, I got my hands on one of a number of freely-roaming luggage carts and settled into the throng of people waiting for suitcases. Apparently, I chose poorly, because, of all the passengers, with all their luggage carts, I was singled out.

“That’s my cart,” someone behind me said.

I saw no reason to believe him, and, admittedly, told him so.

“You use my cart, you pay me,” he protested.

This went on for a few parries, just long enough to settle the matter peaceably, without the exchange of either money or fisticuffs. But, unfortunately, also long enough to infuriate a thrice-as-large-as-me passenger from my flight (who, incidentally, happened to be friends with my armrest mate). He turned around, sheer anger on his face, took my two bags and proceeded to hurl them to the floor with as much force as he could muster (which was a lot).

As if this wasn’t dramatic enough, he then began screaming at me, his words mostly drowned out in the shower of spittle I found myself under. When he started pushing—hard—a small British nun in a grey habit stepped between us. For this, I’ll one day get to thank her.

After my erstwhile attacker had returned to his conversation with my erstwhile armrest antagonist, she turned to me, said, “They do things a little differently here,” and quickly disappeared into the throng.

Evidently.

Why do this? Why dodge the near-blows of irate Beninese men? After all, we all have our share of near-miss travel stories. Is it simply wanderlust? Dopamine imbalance? An irrepressible search for better and better stories?

I think the answers are deeper. I volunteer for a humanitarian medical organization, as a surgeon on-board the world’s largest charity hospital ship and part of a crew of 400 strong that provides medical and surgical care to the populations of some of the poorest nations in the world. We come from all over the world, representing 35 countries, and we all come with that expressed purpose: to bring hope and healing to the world’s forgotten poor.

You think differently, act differently, and hope differently when you’ve experienced the world.

Travel has been in my blood for as long as I can remember, and all travel teaches you to look at the world differently. You order your Starbucks differently when you’ve been to coffee plantations. You watch movies differently when you’ve been to the countries they portray. You hear music differently when it evokes nostalgia for places you’ve been. You think differently, act differently, and hope differently when you’ve experienced the world.

But this sort of travel—this is singular. Entering into the world of another changes you more deeply than I could ever have imagined. I spent five months in 2008 aboard the same ship, in Liberia. I met patients with long-neglected tumors deforming their countenances beyond recognition. I met children with diseases which we in the West give no second thought to—but which, there, became near-certain death sentences. But I also met the smiles and the laughter and the hugs and the tears of people who were just as real, just as broken, and just as hopeful as any you would ever meet. Back then, I wrote this:

Their faces were fantastically deformed by Brobdingnagian tumors, scarred expressionless by burns, and bandaged beyond recognition. They jumped, shuffled, and shook, with their trachs, their crutches, their legs casted into immobility. They danced, amputated. They sang, voiceless. They smiled, scarred.

In the middle of all of us westerners who sheepishly ringed the edges, this was the church of the outcast, the shunned, the spurned, the grotesque. This was the congregation of the sideshow.

And it was beautiful.

So it was, for that beauty, that I found myself in Benin this year, saved only by the grace of a diminutive nun. And my first night back, standing on the top deck of the ship, watching the water and breathing the diesel-laden African air, I’d come home.

Subscribe to TravelBlogs Posted by Mark Shrime from Hope and Healing. on March 3rd, 2009 in Articles.
Tags: Benin, medical volunteering, volunteer work, voluntourism, why we travel