Skip to main content

 Why do some of us yearn to get away

Why do we travel? What makes one person want to set off into the unknown, while the next is perfectly content at home?

I knew nothing of the outside world when I was young. However, I remember a cousin saying her family might move to America. I was immediately jealous. Not because I would miss her, but because I wanted to go in her place. I knew nothing of America, only that it was somewhere else, somewhere new, and I was ready to go there. A few years later, I was about eleven, and I told my granny that when I grew up, I wanted to travel. “Oh no,” she told me, with a scowl. “The men in the family travel, the women stay at home.” I still remember the stillness in the air when she said those words. I thought I had stopped breathing. But I didn’t argue with her. No one argued with granny. I simply knew that I had to find a way to bypass the women who stayed at home. Thankfully, when I was 15, a speaker visited an after-school club and she gave me the perfect plan. She had been a midwife in Papua New Guinea, sent there by Voluntary Services Overseas. As she spoke, I knew that I could do this too. I could save women from death and disease and have my travel and adventure. Granny would not be able to say a word. 

And that is how I got away. It wasn’t an easy path. Nursing school was difficult. I had studied physics rather than biology at school, so anatomy wasn’t always clear to me - In my first few weeks I was told that the rectal temperature was the core temperature of the body, and I remember thinking, 'rectum, hmm, where is the rectum?' Thankfully, by the time I reached midwifery school I had a better grasp of body parts. And I'm immensely grateful to Voluntary Services Overseas who saw my earnestness and sent the 23-year-old me to a mission  hospital in northern Zambia. My life changed forever. It wasn't easy, and there were times when I wanted to run home. But the naive young thing who thought she knew everything evolved into a woman who knew life was complex and that white folks had much to learn from black folks.

So why do some of us want to run off to new worlds? So many reasons - adventure, challenge and, I think, because life is short. Who wants to regret the road not taken?

I returned to northern Zambia and revisited Chilonga 25 years later. So happy to have taken that road.


 





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're all foreigners somewhere

  Most of us don’t think of ourselves as foreigners, even when we’re overseas. We believe that we are one with the wider group. After all, foreigners are something else, they are the people who don’t belong. I remember the first time I realised I was be an outsider. My British Caledonian flight to Zambia had landed in Lusaka and, when I looked out onto the tarmac, none of the ground staff looked like me. It gave me a thrill but also a sense of vulnerability. These people were not my people and I wondered if I would be safe among them. That thought prompted another – this is how visitors to my own country must feel. They are outnumbered, and their dress, skin colour, hair, any number of things, mark them out and perhaps leave them open to hostility. I have to say that I met no hostility in Zambia. Instead, my social skills grew as I learned to reach out to the people I lived among. Perhaps I did it to fit in, to ensure that I was less of a foreigner. I didn’t anticipate feeling ...
Post a Comment
Read more
If no one ever left home Think of a world where no one ever travelled. One where we knew all our neighbours, our landscapes, and we shared the same philosophy on life. In this world we would know nothing of what lay over a hillside, behind a mountain or across the sea. Some people in this world, they are perfectly happy here.   Personally, I feel smothered even writing that description. Travel is as much about considering new ideas as it is about taking a photo or buying a t-shirt. My first trip overseas was magical although perhaps not in some people's eyes. I travelled from Scotland to Greece by bus - four days of looking out of the window onto a foreign world, my very own vista. It was dawn when we reached the Greek border, the hillsides were golden and, as I looked around, I would not have been surprised to see a shepherd and his nymphs frolicking downhill toward me. No matter the long bus journey, I had arrived into a magical land. The children of The Lion, the Witch and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

To guide or not to guide

  The mobile phone has made travel easier. Not only can we contact our loved ones more easily, tell them we’re in trouble, ask for help, or simply tell them that we miss them, but the mobile phone gives us access to maps, a compass, and guides on where to eat and places to stay. When I began travelling, which was in the dark ages before the internet, I would write to a country’s tourist board and tell them what part of their country I wanted to visit. They would send me a stack of brochures, and I would pour over the photos and the text for months ahead of our trip. My friends were not so engaged. All they wanted was sun and they left the planning to me. Looking back, there wasn’t a lot of planning. We’d take the bus from the old airport in Athens to Piraeus, step into any of the ferry offices and buy a ticket to an island. We didn’t ask where to find the ferry but would walk along the port side yelling at anyone on board each boat: “Paros”, “Crete” or wherever. Most times we w...
Post a Comment
Read more