Waiting for the rain. Timbuktu, Mali. Photo by Luis Dafos.

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.

Leaving Mopti for Timbuktu, Mali. Photo by Luis Dafos.

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.

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2009. | Why We Travel: Mark Shrime’s Story | 3 comments |
Post categories: Articles
Post tags: Benin, medical volunteering, volunteer work, voluntourism, why we travel

© Eric Daams for TravelBlogs, 2007. | Randall Wood | No comment |
Post categories: Blogs
Post tags: Africa, Benin, living abroad, Nicaragua, travel writer

If you’ve spent time travelling around Nicaragua in the past few years, you may already know of Randall Wood.

Randy co-authored the Moon Handbook Nicaragua after living there for several years, part of which was spent working with the Peace Corps. He also wrote a companion guide for expats living in Nicaragua.

TravelBlogs got in touch with him to find out about more about his experiences with the Peace Corps, Nicaragua and his current home, Benin.

When did you first start travelling?

I think my first really formative trip was in 1983 when my family drove from New York to California and back in a 1968 VW Bus. It was a really eye opening experience for me as a 12 year old, and ever since then I’ve been curious about what lies just over the horizon. My first independent trip was after my freshman year at Cornell, however. Rather than going back home when classes ended I packed a backpack and took a Greyhound to Seattle and a boat up to Alaska, where I worked on fishing boats for a summer. That was a great, independent trip, and the first of three cross country bus rides. The feeling of a backpack on your back that you know contains just what you need to get by and nothing else is unmistakable and frankly, rather addictive. I’ve tried to keep moving ever since, and immediately after I graduated from Cornell I relocated once every year for a decade.

What inspired you to go to Nicaragua with the Peace Corps?

By slowing down long enough to really integrate myself into Nicaraguan culture I probably learned as much about myself and about my own culture as I did about Nicaragua

The Peace Corps assigns you a country, you don’t choose it, so I didn’t choose Nicaragua in particular, although that happened to be a great choice for me. And I actually went into Peace Corps reluctantly, thinking I would find a more interesting and non-traditional route to working overseas. But in hindsight it was one of the best experiences of my life, and it did change my life dramatically. I was in Boston at the time, doing engineering work and dreaming about working overseas. I was also at a point in my life where I was looking for adventure and a change of pace, and I liked the idea of experiencing another culture in a very up close and personal way. There are a lot of advantages to traveling, but you miss out on that level of insight when you are moving fast. The Peace Corps was a great opportunity to spend a long period of time in a foreign culture, and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, by slowing down long enough to really integrate myself into Nicaraguan culture I probably learned as much about myself and about my own culture as I did about Nicaragua. And this, of course, is the reason we travel.

You’re currently living and working in Benin for the Millennium Challenge Corporation. What kind of work does the MCC do?

The MCC is an innovative economic development agency – have a look at www.mcc.gov. The MCC works with a small subset of developing countries and helps them implement development projects that remove key impediments to economic growth. It’s challenging and exciting work, and has given me a chance to experience life in West Africa, an area of the world I had never visited before. Benin is probably 20 years behind Nicaragua with regard to its economic development. And Nicaragua was 20 years behind Indonesia, the first place I spent a serious amount of time overseas. So in a way, each country I’ve lived in has been less developed than the previous one. It’s amazing what you learn by stripping away the layers of the American lifestyle to see what’s underneath. Benin is a much different world relative to the United States, and the Beninese people have been fascinating and friendly.

Why did you decide to go to Benin? Why not another place in Latin America?

Because the world is large! I’ve never understood how people can decide to become an expert in a single country, when there are so many different places and cultures to experience. I have lived in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Europe, and found something interesting and challenging about each of those places. I have worked briefly in Mozambique but didn’t know much about Francophone Africa, and this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. Fortunately, it is an opportunity that hasn’t disappointed me. I think my heart will always be in Latin America, but someday I will look back on my years in Africa with pride and pleasure. And the surf has been fantastic.

Tell us a bit more about the Moon Handbook. How are Moon Handbooks different from Lonely Planet guides, for example?

You’re referring to Moon Handbook Nicaragua, which I co-authored with Joshua Berman. We also wrote a companion guide to Nicaragua called Moon Living Abroad Nicaragua. Guidebooks are a matter of taste, and to some degree there’s a bit of variation even among titles by the same publisher, because the author’s ability to research and describe places is so important to the success of a guidebook. My first experience with a travel guidebook was in Indonesia with Moon Handbook Indonesia, by Bill Dalton. It was hands down the bible to traveling in Indonesia, and I really appreciated the insight that book gave me into the culture, the history, and really the flavor of life in Indonesia. So when I began writing a guidebook to Nicaragua, Moon was the first publisher I thought of approaching. It turns out they were evaluating another proposal at the time, but they put that one on hold to look at our proposal. A couple of months later we had a contract and a deadline, and the race was on to complete the manuscript. It was a wild time. Any good guidebook should do three things: provide you the facts you need to make good decisions about your trip, provide guidance with regard to what is worth doing and what is worth skipping, and provide you with enough cultural context to help you understand and appreciate the people among whom you are traveling. In my opinion, the Moon handbook series does these three things admirably, and Joshua and I are both very proud of Moon Handbook Nicaragua, which immediately became the best selling guidebook to Nicaragua.

In what ways did writing the Moon Handbook to Nicaragua deepen your appreciation of the country?

Something strange happens when you start to write about a place: enjoying it and helping others to enjoy it are much different activities.

That’s a great question. I wrote Moon Handbook Nicaragua after living in Nicaragua for almost five years, and I’ve lived there on and off with my wife ever since, so before I even picked up a pencil to write I had already had a long time with which to appreciate Nicaragua. But something strange happens when you start to write about a place: enjoying it and helping others to enjoy it are much different activities. Something about writing forces you to analyze and pare down the emotional side of travel so you can give other people a sense of what you think is worth liking, and to do so you really have to focus on the facts. Guidebook writing, in particular, is an extreme example of this. In writing Moon Handbook Nicaragua I really had to focus on what I liked about Nicaragua, but I also had to come to a better understanding about what makes life in Nicaragua a challenge. Any good guidebook should show you both sides and let you make your own decision. So the experience of writing that guidebook and later, Moon Living Abroad Nicaragua, helped me to focus on what I thought makes Nicaragua special. I hope that comes through in the text of both books.

Are you working on any new major writing projects?

I’m working on several writing projects, including a collection of short stories about life in Nicaragua, a memoir about Indonesia, and several analytical/research works about economics and development. You can have a sneak preview here.

Check out Randy’s site to read his latest travel writing.

© Eric Daams for TravelBlogs, 2007. | Guide Books, Nicaragua and Benin: Interview with Randall Wood | No comment |
Post categories: Interviews
Post tags: Africa, Benin, cultural experiences, life-changing experiences, living abroad, Millennium Challenge Corporation, Moon Handbooks, Nicaragua, Peace Corps, travel writer, travel writing