How Does it Change Us?

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks our heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you.” - Anthony Bourdain

    My childhood involved more planes than it should have. My parents loved traveling, and in-part to my mom’s worries about leaving us behind, my sister and I were almost always brought along for their excursions. On each embarkment, new faces emerge with their own set of presuppositions and the indelible memories that some left behind. It’s a common question in cognitive psychology: are human beings truly a clean slate or from birth or tainted with some expectations and axioms about the world around us. In hindsight, these kinds of questions fundamentally drive my recollections of travel abroad.
    A few years before attending Andrews, my father and I went to the Maldives, an island chain off the coast of India known for its absolutely incredible fish diversity as well as manta ray and whale shark populations—the two of us are avid scuba divers and the opportunity to encounter such pelagics couldn’t be passed up. The diving was sensational, everything we could hope for. But even life’s highest moments cannot occur in a vacuum, nothing shields them from the very real tragedy of life. Upon boarding our live-aboard, a boat which fifteen to twenty people may live on while diving, our captain provided his welcome speech to the new guests. However, as we quickly recognized, he was heavily intoxicated—and as we’d come to find out, also high on multiple narcotics. Within a matter of minutes, one of his supporting officers brought him away from the spotlight and he vanished. Moments later still, a Maldives police boat docked beside our vessel and we observed the transfer of our captain to their authorities. Upon returning to port after our week of diving, we were informed that our captain had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison—plus an additional two years for failing to comply in providing a drug test.
    The Maldives’ legal system works under Sharia law, a legal code that most Westerners associate with particularly violent and seemingly exaggerated legal punishments. The legal system, for our captain at least, worked unbelievably swiftly in determining his sentence with little consideration for appeal: a man who I believed to be in his late twenties, would go on to spend the next decade and a half of life in a prison. A victimless crime, to be almost certain, that would likely receive little more than a slap on the wrist in most American states.
   But we aren’t given Edward Said’s Orientalism at birth. How could my teenage self reconcile what appeared to be a clear reinforcement of the West’s construction of the Islamic Other? Or is it true, that maybe our attempt to counter the work of our ancestors’ colonial project allowed the glossing-over of genuine atrocities against very real people? Even now, in assessing the justness of their ruling, I turn to the West’s legal principles regarding marijuana and alcohol. Certainly, you cannot ignore the structural and systemic differences, that the Canadian and American constitutions base their understanding on Enlightenment humanism—that of Rousseau and Locke. Comparatively, Islamic jurisprudence still heavily relies on the Qu’ran as well as secondary accounts from the Prophet. It’s a very cursory examination, but it's these systemic differences between how states form their legal systems that guide very real legal decisions centuries later. I believe that we carry an ethical burden to be holistic and honest in personal determinations like these, it remains all-too-easy to simply rest on your presuppositions and only look for cases that confirm them. And yet, how does one react when their only lived experience with a particular entity—in my case, the Sharia legal system—exactly confirms our cultural presupposition?
    My father, a physician in Western Canada, began a medical humanitarian team with many of his fellow Canadian colleagues when I was very young. For about five consecutive years, my parents would travel to Nicaragua and in-coordination with state health officials, my father and a team of doctors would perform surgeries and train Nicaraguan medical personnel. I was young, maybe between the ages of nine and twelve, when my parents brought my sister and I down for two of these trips. During our stay, we would often spend time around the compound with occasional cultural trips to nearby cities after my father would finish his day of operations. These moments proved formative, as I remember in the most undeveloped sense recognizing the raw power of class disparity and absolutely soul-wrenching poverty. But through a child’s eyes, these sensationalized adjectives were understood simply that these people must have harder lives than I. At this same time in my childhood, I was highly sensitive to the well-being of animals—and to this day, I still am. Insulated from true poverty, even the rare occasions of it in Canada, had allowed the empathy typically reserved for the downtrodden human condition to transition to creatures whose living conditions seemed to harm their quality of life. As I recall, the heart of a child recognized injustice in Nicaragua and my hindsight reminds me that I desperately missed the point.  
    Our breakfasts consisted of rice and beans, often with additional pork or beef. Every morning, I’d take my leftover meat and I’d put it in a plastic bag and take it out to one of the many local emaciated dogs who roamed the streets of Nicaragua. I recall, on the second or third morning, being scolded by one of the cooks, “how can you feed these dogs when there are people here who cannot feed themselves?” It's a powerful question, even more so when articulated by a local, a person who’s entire lived experience was spent amid these conditions. At the time of our medical trips, the lives of many rural Nicaraguans was tremendously difficult. Decades of American interference into Nicaraguan politics and subsequent non-democratic terms from men like Anastasio Somoza and Daniel Ortega left parts of the country economically disenfranchised and impoverished. The reason, I believe, that animal mistreatment has always touched me differently lies in animals’ inability to articulate issues for themselves, and their relative incapacity to better themselves in the face of human advancement into nature.
   Bourdain rightly identifies that travel changes us. The struggle with travel, however, remains the sample size of the experience. If one was to assume that my experience in the Maldives would be representative of daily life, it would create difficult presuppositions to reconcile. In truth, what I saw likely indicates the harsh potentialities of their legal system, but probably not a common occurrence. It's a duality to some extent, where travelers often begin on the most sanitized vistas and moments while avoiding experiences that may be indicative of an area or people's actuality. Of course, exceptions occur, where aid workers seek out locales decimated by natural disaster or economic downturn; but again, the same issue of sample size emerges. When we leave our normal, the realm that we inhabit most-often, the experiences we have run the risk of being anomalies. And yet, an epistemic question remains, 'how do we know that the events we experienced one time are (a)typical?' This may seem like an abstract question, but I believe our (often limited) experiences with the Other fundamentally impact our perspective upon return. When talking about political phenomena in the Middle East, or hear North Americans discuss Islamic law, I always must balance my lived experience against my training in political science. It's the ability to alter one's perspective and knowledge, I believe, that gives travel such an allure. The fundamental issue, however, remains that upon arrival, not even the traveler can determine how and why they are to be changed–just that they will be.
  

Works Cited
Bourdain, Anthony. No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach.
Bloomsbury USA, 2007.

Originally published on October 7, 2020.