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 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.


 





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