on the importance of travel

Carthage ruins, Tunisia

At the end of August, I made my first foray into North Africa, something I've been wanting to do since arriving in southern France last year and making North Africa my neighbor. Upon setting foot in Tunis, I quickly found myself falling at least half in love with Tunisia from the word go.

I hadn't been sure what to expect given the Middle Eastern/North African security warnings dominating the airways in the weeks leading up to my hop across the Mediterranean. But our Tunisian travels went off without a hitch.

Tunisia felt partly familiar and partly exotic. It was this beautiful mélange of other places I've visited or lived in and loved: India, sub-Saharan Africa, France. Yet, it had its own spice. And who's not attracted to someone who's comfortable to be around but keeps things interesting with a little fire and spirit?

By all Instagram appearances, my trip across the sea was a fun vacation. In this case, appearances are only partly correct. In reality, any travel I do is also work. But, hey, work can be fun! You see, given the line of work I'm in and the vision I have for the stories I want to tell more of, every exposure to new cultures and places is extremely valuable, whether I'm there to tell an already-assigned story or not.

I've written more articles related to Haiti and interviewed more Haitians from the U.S. than I did during my month in Haiti in 2008. But because of having spent that month in Haiti, I had a better context for everything my Haitian interviewees said to me in those later interviews. I understood their world more than I would have if I had never been to Haiti. Before I interviewed them across telephone wires, I had been in their home country, ridden in tap-taps, eaten Haitian food, and enjoyed the vibrancy of their culture. This allowed me to connect with them better, drawing out their trust. It allowed me to ask better questions. It allowed me to understand their answers through a lens that wasn't only American.

When I was in Kenya in 2007, I wrote on my blog about my visit to one of the slums outside Nairobi. I had been in Africa for 4 or 5 weeks at that point, and I had been listening attentively to everything I could in order to understand accurately what I observed. Yet, I still got something wrong. It's just a short little sentence in the middle of a blog post, and it's not even actually factually wrong. But the way I used that sentence painted an inaccurate picture, though I didn't know that until a long time later.

The offending sentence is this one: "Several of the children and babies weren't wearing underwear or diapers." I wrote it in a paragraph illustrating the needs in the slum and at a particular orphanage. A while later, well after returning to the U.S., after the images from these travels and others had had time to roll around in my brain for a while, a question emerged.

What if the reason those little kids weren't wearing underwear or diapers had nothing to do with poverty?

I ranged back over the images archived in my head. And maybe some recorded in pixels too. I began to realize that it was mostly the littlest kids running around with uncovered bottoms. The older kids usually had some sort of clothing.

I'm not sure what connected the dots for me, but I finally asked a friend who came from one of Africa's countries about it, to check out my hunch: Were those kids diaper- and underwear-less because they were still potty training? And in a community where most of life happens outdoors, it makes way more sense to let the three-year-olds run around free to go when the need hits? (How many American three-year-olds wouldn't love the same freedom?)

My hunch was confirmed. But you see, I didn't ask the question back when I wrote that blog post, because it never crossed my mind that there was any possible interpretation other than the fact that no one had money to get clothes for these poor kids.

I thought I understood, so I didn't ask.

A story is normally only as good as the questions one asks before writing it. And this is why I need to travel and learn as much as I can. Because it was traveling and observing and putting two and two together that finally prompted the question and corrected my impressions.

I'll never be able to rid my stories of all such errors, but my goal is to keep chipping away at my own and others' incorrect impressions. I want to keep being confronted by questions I never thought to ask before.

Thus, I need to travel as often and as much as I can, for the sake of the stories I will write. Work and rest are nearly inseparable in a writer's life. Any experience is fair game for one day being written up. Most of the time, that's perfectly fine. Working didn't make my Tunisian vacation any less fun. :-)