Lisa Niver's Blog: We Said Go Travel, page 289

Curaçao: Home is where vacation lies

I often think about the places where I’ve been in the past few years and believe that I’m quite blessed to have visited so many different countries. From zip lining in San Juan, to riding on elephants in Bangkok, and featuring in a short film in Mumbai, I believe that I’ve experienced an incredible travelling journey that is yet to unfold. However, I am deeply grateful to be living on Curaçao, the island that has been my home for the past 15 years. I left Toronto at the age of 2 and moved to Curaçao, an island with an average temperature of 27 degrees Celsius just off the coast of Venezuela. From crystal clear beaches to stunning architecture, Curaçao is a gem of a country with a unique history and culture.

In my 15 years of living here, Curaçao has always seemed to me as an amalgamation of various countries due to its diverse communities and cultural events that happen on a day-to-day basis. Curaçao respects the various ethnic groups and religions, while forming a global society with a population of approximately 150,000 people. Despite such a small community, the island is filled with talented individuals that inspire the country to excel in their fields of study, such as Curaçao’s prominent baseball team(s) who continue to make us proud today. Due to such a diverse and welcoming community, I can proudly say that I have friends and acquaintances from such disparate backgrounds, which gives me a wider perspective on their customs and traditions. These are often quite interesting, which evolve into learning traditional dances and devouring the unique food.

Going to the international school on Curaçao has allowed me to become familiar with languages that I probably wouldn’t have learned had I lived in another country. Learning Spanish, Dutch, and Papiamento (the local language of the island) has given me the ability to appreciate the cultures associated with these languages, to the point where I celebrate the birthday of the King of the Netherlands and attend the local Carnival, which is the representation of the premier cultural and party festival on Curaçao. Being of Indian origin, these events often seem quite intriguing to me and it’s fascinating to see how different backgrounds are united and integrated through these events.

These celebrations in Curaçao are symbolic of the population’s respect to different cultures and how well they embrace this culture to adopt it as their own. Remarkable, isn’t it? Despite living here for the majority of my life, I like to believe that I’ve always lived like a tourist in Curaçao, discovering something new about it as the years pass, as well as learning more about its culture by connecting with the locals. It’s safe to say that Curaçao is like a treasure chest; the deeper you dig, the more things you discover about it. From hiking up on Christoffel Mountain and viewing the highest point on Curaçao to scuba diving by the reefs, the island has always offered me a new and adventurous experience, one that I will always cherish and value. I am forever grateful for having the opportunity of calling Curaçao my home, and as I travel to other countries over the next few years, I will get to experience new cultures and communities, which will hopefully fulfill the items on the bucket list!

Thank you for reading and commenting. Please enter the Gratitude Travel Writing competition and tell your story.

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Indecision on a Train in Italy

I hesitated at the entrance of the train, unwilling to step onto the platform and risk getting locked out of the car. The sign at the platform clearly read “Rho” and not “Busto Arsizio,” but I still couldn’t shake the indecision from my gut. “Is this the stop for Busto Arsizio?” I asked a woman exiting the train. “No, this is Rho,” she responded, not waiting to see whether her words confirmed my worst suspicion, that I had indeed boarded the wrong train. I looked out of the car helplessly.

It was my first time taking the train back to my new apartment in small town Italy and I had already screwed up. I dreaded what would happen if I stayed on what was potentially the wrong train and traveled even further away from my destination. I would miss the last bus from the station and be stuck in a taxi-less town with no way of getting back to my apartment. The dread on my face must have been bad enough for a woman on the platform to approach me. “Excuse me, but I heard you asking about Busto Arsizio?” “Sì,” I responded in Italian, still too anxious to exit the train. “You have to take this train on the other side of the platform.” She smiled at me and gestured to the train that had just pulled into the station. She took a step back and motioned for me to follow her. “Really?” I asked while looking from my feet to the train opposite me. It was now or never.

I took a breath and stepped onto the platform beside her. “Yes, it’s the second stop, right before mine.” She made her way to the doors. “Thank you so much!” I said as I followed her onto the new train. My butterflies had not subsided, so I walked with her into a car and sat across from her. “Don’t worry. I know it can be confusing to travel somewhere new. These trains can be complicated.” She pulled out her phone and didn’t say anything else after that. I was so relieved that I had gotten on the right train and surprised that a random stranger had been so helpful. My nerves settled and I sat the rest of the journey in silence. She was talking on her cell phone when the time came for me to depart. I mouthed a silent “Grazie” to her and climbed down to the Busto Arsizio platform. I made it, I thought. In that moment on the train at Rho, I felt a sort of gratitude that only comes from a sense of despair. I was entirely out of my element. Unlike in the United States, there was no conductor or announcement telling me what to do. I had never traveled alone in the area before. I have no problem admitting that if that woman hadn’t helped me in that moment, I probably would have remained on the first train and continued on until I was so far north that the mountains started to come into sight.

But she did help me. She took pity on a confused girl clinging to the doorframe of a train and decided to do something. She went out of her way for me and I won’t forget that. I still may not be an expert on the Italian train system, but I just a little bit wiser thanks to the help of that one woman. She may not have thought much of it, and could even have forgotten my face by the end of her phone call. Whatever the case, I will always be grateful for her small attempt to help me make sense of my new Italian home.

Thank you for reading and commenting. Please enter the Gratitude Travel Writing competition and tell your story.

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Lessons In China

I got off the bus, my right foot landing smack in a muddy puddle. Flecks of greenish-brown dirt clung to my leather boots. “There’s something very wrong with a school that has stagnant puddles at the entrance,” I said to Mariam, who was checking her own grey coat for signs of muddy spray. She looked at me and shrugged. We had arrived at a school, a little out of the city of Beijing, in China. This wasn’t just any school. There were no uniformed children running around, no school bells ringing and no anxious parents waiting in shiny cars outside. Rather, the Beijing School for Migrants* had a hand-painted purple and yellow gate, macaroni art taped on the brick walls and bright plastic tricycles lying around. We were not impressed. “That might be an owl. Or a squirrel. Or if you really tilt your head, a bowl of rice.

Which reminds me, I’m starving,” said Mariam, critically appraising one of the macaroni masterpieces with all her nonexistent expertise. I mimed having a gun to my head, being shot and dying on the road. Little did I know, I’d regret that five second act for all my days to come. “Before we go inside, I’ll tell you a bit about this place,” said Leslie, our guide and a volunteer at the school, trying to smooth her white blond hair, which had decided to dance in the morning wind, “These are migrants’ kids. Their parents cannot afford to send them to regular school; they are mostly farmers or herders who live in rural China. They drop off their children here and try to see them twice in two years, if they’re lucky,” she said. I straightened, now paying attention. Imagine being a little kid and not seeing your parents for years.

Who would you go to for love and comfort? “There’s more. These kids weren’t allowed to go to school at all till 2008. That’s when the government gave in to social demand and schools like these started to crop up on the outskirts of Beijing. These children are not only from poor migrant families, but they’re also unique,” she said, clearing her throat. “They have various handicaps. Some are mentally different and some physically. That’s what makes them really wonderful,” she said, wrapping her cherry wool coat snugly around her. Now I was intrigued. We shuffled inside the gate in a single file. The red brick building was low and almost forward stooping, as if sheltering its inhabitants inside. There was a pond to my left; I saw myself mirrored in it amidst clumpy grey reeds, blotchy algae and tiny brown insects.

The school seemed neglected. As if it were decaying. The traditional Chinese letters for peace were scratched onto the doorframe. I passed through, feeling anything but peaceful. We were taken to a classroom with bright blue walls and red rubber mats on the floor. The paint was chipped in places, and the rubber was cracked and split around the edges. This is a functioning school? Slowly, children began to enter, led by three chaperones. The kids were dressed simply in brown trousers, shirts and white sneakers. One little girl didn’t have shoes on. She wore white socks with beaded edges. Her cropped black hair and thick fringe framed a round face with large grey eyes, a small upturned nose and a harelip. She looked as if she was angry enough to kill someone. “She not like to wear these, her shoes. Every time we try and she screams. These are her special socks,” an elderly chaperone told me when she saw me looking. The girl, named Lin, went to a corner of the room and started fiddling with her socks. She would take one off, neatly fold it, then unfold gently and slip it on again. This ritual continued and when she saw me staring, she glared. I looked away. The other kids were of assorted ages, heights and tempers. There were teenagers and 20 year olds. And we were going to teach them the alphabet. Leslie asked everyone to pair up with a child. I was about to go over to Lin and try to win her over – I found her curious and decided she must be in a brooding teenage phase – when I felt a tug on my sleeve. “Ni hao,” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiled. “Ni hao,” I replied. He waited. I stared.

Then suddenly, as if deciding something, he took my sleeve and led me to a mat in the center of the room. “Mine,” he said. I asked his permission to sit down, as if I were a guest attending a tea party. He laughed at my formality, sat down with a thump and made plenty of space for me. Then he took out chunks of play doh from a plastic barrel at his side and started shaping a crude ‘A.’ He wanted to show me what he knew! For the next hour we sat together, molding letters from the slippery clay, laughing at each other’s crumbling structures and trading tips. He spoke in broken English, telling me the weather that day was fen (fine) and he was smile (happy). I replied as best I knew how. It wasn’t until much later when he turned his head to look out the window that I saw it. There was a shiny pink thickly ridged scar running down the back of his head, from crown to neck. It was as thick as my thumb and I knew anything that had produced that had to have hurt. He saw me staring and smiled. “Bamp!” he said. I was confused. “Bamp!” he repeated. I shook my head. “He means his bump. He had brain surgery a while back; they removed a tumor.

He’s had that ever since,” Leslie explained. He just laughed at my worried look. Oh my. And here I was miming being shot, and fretting over my boots, when this 12-year-old child had already suffered brain surgery and could not live with his parents. He was perfectly content with play doh and rubber mats and a pond covered with algae. He saw a world I didn’t, but now that I had, would not readily forget. I nearly cried. He saw my saddened face and shining eyes. And he hugged me. And took my hand, ran it along his scar and smiled. To show me it didn’t hurt. He made sure I was okay when I’d swallowed his pain and was crying over his life. Before we left, he came over and handed me a wad of blue play doh. My going away present. And laughed and waved when I was leaving. In China, I learned many things: how to use chopsticks, how to navigate the crowded subway system and how to tell fried scorpions from fried spiders. But the most I learned was at that school, with those children, each carrying irrevocable loss and seeing only starlight. They didn’t see the cracked doorframe, or the muddy pond, or the peeling paint. They saw only their teachers and volunteers, people with smiling faces who worked to keep that school going from the inside, where it mattered. And I have been grateful ever since.

Thank you for reading and commenting. Please enter the Gratitude Travel Writing competition and tell your story.

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Arrival in the USA

ARRIVAL

Despite having traveled abroad and lived in diverse places – London, Australia, and a 1951 yellow Jimmy schoolbus in Northern California – these days I don’t want to travel farther than I can see. From my tiny cabin, set in a bowl of the Wet Mountains with a head-on view of the Sangre de Cristos, I see far. On a crystalline day like today, when the temperature’s zero and the light so bright on the snow I wear sunglasses inside, I glimpse the Huajatollas (Spanish Peaks) sixty miles to the south, and the Collegiates far to the north. No trees obscure my sightline. Mountains and me, my dogs, my son, the sun, and wind. Sky and clouds and nobody else. Here at 9,100 feet, we live at what feels like the top of the world. When I drive home up the steep rocky incline called “Little Bad Hill” – not to be confused with “Big Bad Hill” further south – I leave mundane troubles behind for the heights, where ideas emerge sharper, like the spires of the Crestone Needle due west, and emotions richer, like the plumed cumulonimbus roiling up and anvilling out in summer thunderstorms.

Here, I can think, feel, and breathe, unencumbered. Twenty years ago, on a weekend winter escape from graduate school at the University of Denver, a friend and I drove three hours south, then west up 96, climbing the soaring Hardscrabble Canyon, and, not long afterward, setting eyes for the first time on the Wet Mountain Valley, its great expanse not yet scathed by human intent. The small towns of Silver Cliff and Westcliffe claim the valley floor at 7,888 feet, and abandoned mines speckle the hills east of town, but then, as now, one can see far and wide, as the aboriginal peoples did, without feeling fettered by what Huck Finn sardonically called sivilization. One feels small here, like the miniscule figures in Asian landscape paintings the viewer has to hunt to find. Appropriately, one feels one’s humility in the natural world. We spent a weekend with our typewriters (the manual kind) and our dictionaries (French, Swedish) translating poetry and breathing the clear cold air of a place without traffic or traffic lights, watching through our binoculars red-tailed hawks and kestrels riding thermals. For the first time I’d encountered a land in which I felt free.

Free of constraints on my thinking as well as liberated from ordinariness. One week before, my friend and I huddled in the night at her Washington Park apartment, terrorized, as a helicopter circled over, buzzing the usually quiet corner again and again, a policeman’s amplified voice demanding the person being chased to come out in the street and give himself up. Running footfalls echoed on the spotlit sidewalks. Silent with fear, we trembled in darkness, dreading that whoever was fleeing the law might break into this ground floor flat to hide from his pursuers. Thankfully, he did not. Although I was born on the East Coast, spent most of my adulthood on the West Coast, and always thought of myself as an “ocean person,” in my thirties and now forties, I find my solace landlocked, here in the Sangres. For two summers, I sojourned on the Oregon Coast after moving to Portland in 1990; then Colorado summoned me back. In the Huérfano and Wet Mountain Valleys, I soon found myself renting cabins and adobes, my Honda packed tight with books and typewriter – not to be replaced by a computer until the twenty-first century.

After spring finals, I couldn’t wait to drive the 1,500 miles, to arrive where I could read and write – not commentary on student papers but my own stories. I do not miss the ocean. I find the Northwest’s forests claustrophobic, the endless moisture heavy on my lungs. Moss grows on the roof of Portland bungalows as if to seal their inhabitants hermetically from light, and it never, ever thunders. Here, now, the sun wakes me in my bed and sets out the dining table window; the coyotes serenade us to sleep. Finally, I am where I want to be.

Thank you for reading and commenting. Please enter the Gratitude Travel Writing competition and tell your story.

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India: Words are not all…

The family used to be our neighbor from the very first day we shifted to our own house. Initially a family of two with the wife brimming with a cheerfulness that was contagious— she lovingly cooked various delicacies and we had the privilege of devouring the delicious recipes she tried with deft hands…recipes topped with a certain goodness of spirit which gave them an additional flavor unexplainable in words. Soon they had a daughter and they named her Baani (meaning voice in Bengali). A cheerful petite soul, she brought with herself a surge of delight to the family. Soon she was a favorite with all of us as she graduated from the cradle and arms to a toddler who walked the neighborhood with her wobbling tiny legs. The wife often complained to my mother that she noticed this uncanny streak in Baani as she never answered when called by her name.

Initially disregarded as childhood inattentiveness or late responding traits but after a series of deliberations she visited the doctor and her case was diagnosed as a congenital hearing impaired syndrome. It took quite some time for everyone to accept the harsh truth, however once all of us got over the initial bafflement …started whatever I can precisely define to be ‘life’ for Baani. She started wearing the usual hearing aids…landed up in a school for the not so privileged and was gradually identified officially and unofficially as a ‘special child’. I met this special child every morning when I boarded the car for school and she greeted me with a smile broad enough to fit in all the life-force and strangely conveyed much more than a verbal greeting.

In other words she learnt the language of expressions…ones which were carefully articulated never to miss a speck of any emotion that was intended to be conveyed. Every night when the neighborhood was silent, I heard these muffled incoherent verses from behind the window of her room which I had to strain my ears to identify as sustained efforts to spell the letters of the alphabet. She was up perhaps till the middle of the night –given the extra effort she had to put in because of her special condition.

Those days I burnt my midnight oil in an attempt to triumph my efforts over a good score at my upcoming board exams. I had only one competitor in the whole neighborhood that I never could beat as far as night riding was concerned. My tired nerves gave in and I surrendered to the luxuries of slumber while she tirelessly pursued her endeavors at grammar and parts of speech or maybe on a more subtle level put in her heart and mind to graduate to a normal child from a special one. Whenever life graced me with my share of misgivings…unanswered prayers which left me somber and reflective…I found my terrace very effective. A place where I had carved my tiny own niche…a little corner but with cathartic effects strong enough to rationalize all my qualms. These were times I discovered a well-known face on the overlooking terrace. Baani had her little space for reflections too. A thoughtful and composed face but which always wore an understanding smile…as if she had well comprehended all the paradoxes of life. I felt so foolish to blame the whole world for not having things my way…and felt so grateful all of a sudden…for being someone who had the privilege of expression…there was this soul who would never say a word in her lifetime no matter how unfairly life treated her. Baani had her whole destiny to blame…and blame silently. I made a point to visit her often. To inspire and motivate her and talk to her just like I would do with any other normal child.

Talk about life in general, her day at school, her friends and about things that excited her. I knew in my heart she appreciated the fact that she was being treated just like a normal human being for a change, while the whole world flung her way oodles of sympathy. I told her the story of Helen Keller and how the will to win could outshine the vulnerability of resignation. I was walking home on an evening, I don’t exactly remember from where. And spotted Baani accompanied by her mother walking towards me happily swinging her tiny plaits wearing the same graceful smile which was so much a part of her character by now. As we treaded nearer her smile broadened as she suddenly drew a trophy from her school bag. She had topped the boards from her school that year. The next moment I was in tears when in an almost immaculate voice she declared…’this is for you…’ The following year Baani made to normal school.

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Belize: Small in Size, Magnificent in Memories

I am flying-arms outstretched, watching the world undulate below me.  Valleys and mountains rise and plants fan out in Technicolor brilliance.  My hair flows past me, wisps that escaped the trappings of my band. My camera is swinging gently in the current; I capture it for a picture, focusing on a minute detail that I would forget in the grand idea.  An animal flies by me, using its adaptations to look like it is gliding with effortless motion.  I try to use the camera to capture the majestic nature surrounding me, to catch the movement.

The current surges around me, a push and pull that I can’t ignore.  I come upon a taller bit of the ground; I reach out with my arms, try to keep my legs tucked, attempting to not touch anything below me as I glide through its branches, fauna flitting beneath and around me.  The pure, perfect turquoise blue is mesmerizing, unable to be captured by any photo.  The light reflections are blinding, but dance along the ground. I close my eyes and let the quiet surround me. Suddenly the peace is broken. I find myself gasping for air, pulling upwards, and attempting to expel the water from the last wave out of my snorkel tube.  My teammate swims up beside me, telling me that our guide had found a nurse shark within 10 meters of where we currently were treading.  I settle myself, take a deep breath, and fight the water current to reenter the world below the waves that previously were just seen pressed against the bubbled glass of an aquarium. I had seen so much during this trip that I never thought possible: bones of ancient beings trapped within crystal and clay, pottery standing broken in the thousands, underwater oasis both in the daylight and deep within caves.

There was white sand between my toes in one place, and hard rock in another as well as rainforests, fields, and underworlds. I had stood at the top of one of the tallest Mayan temples and smelled the wind perfumed with fields being burned for new crops. Belize, though small and monetarily poor, is rich in culture, history, and nature. The population is intertwined with each other and their past, attempting to find their way into the future while preserving all that already happened. A world where a lemon is worth a fortune and a pineapple nothing, and with a total population smaller than most small cities in the United States has found its way into my most poignant and peaceful memories.  When stress seems to overcome, I find my way back to the reef, or the top of the temple Xunantunich, closing my eyes in the water and the wind. It is there, in my memories, that I found myself grateful for the chance to travel, for the chance at peace, for the chance to experience a world so removed from my own. It is there, in my memories, that I find myself grateful for love and compassion, and a desire to try for so much more.

Thank you for reading and commenting. Please enter the Gratitude Travel Writing competition and tell your story.

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Lost in Portugal, I found my way home

If you have ever met anyone from Newfoundland, Canada, trust me you’d know it. There is a pride us Newfoundlanders have for not only being Canadian but more specifically for being from “the rock”, Newfoundland. My home province is a unique island in the North Atlantic with a rugged beauty and mixes influences of its many European visitors. The island is said to have been first discovered by the Vikings and later visited by fisherman from France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and England. There is a joke that says that Newfoundlanders are the only people at the gates of heaven wishing they could go back home.

Earlier this year I was working in the southern United States and Mexico when I lost my job. I was suddenly forced to move back home. Although like most Newfoundlanders the thought of returning to “the rock” was a happy one, I was not looking forward to facing a bitter cold winter after having escaped it for two years. My next thought was simple. While looking for a new job I would continue to learn Spanish. I would go to study in Spain and travel through Portugal to defrost and explore somewhere I had never been. What I didn’t realize was that after traveling over 4000 kilometres I would arrive back in my Grandmother’s kitchen.

Traveling is my favourite hobby. I am one of those people with an ever growing list of must-see places and spend more time staring at maps than I’d like to admit. There is a sense of independence and freedom that comes with traveling. It could be that all your possessions are in the one backpack you’re carrying or it could be from the unpredictability of it all.

I loved Portugal right away. As soon as I arrived my shoulders felt lighter and everything moved a little slower. After touring during the day I was eager to try some Portuguese food. Without warning I was suddenly home again. I was transported to a time when I would sit on a kitchen chair and watch my grandmother cook. The taste of the deep fried cod brought back the smells of her stove and the crackling sound of the fish hitting the frying pan. While trying the Portuguese fish cakes I was reminded of my grandmother’s trick, use cornflakes to give them crunch. The Portuguese rice pudding flooded my mind with memories of fighting with my family over who would get the crispy bits left in the pan. In trying to leave Newfoundland I had done just the opposite. While lost in Lagos, Portugal I had found my way home. This revealed itself again when I was visiting the Discovery monument in Lisbon. There it was on the map, Newfoundland year 1500. Was it possible to feel independent while interdependent? I think Forrest Gump summed it up best when he said “I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze. But I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both are happening at the same time.”

A few weeks prior I was on a train from Madrid to San Sebastián. An older man sitting next to me struck up a conversation. Speaking half in Spanish and half in English he asked where I was from. When he asked where in Canada I took out my phone and showed him on a map. His face lit up as he told me, “Oh! Newfoundland! I was there on a fishing boat from Portugal in 1960.” I smiled at him and said “Small world, isn’t it?”

About the Author: Emily Hatt is a young engineer born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada. Since graduating university two years ago Emily has traveled to 18 countries and counting. Always adding to her list of must-see places, Emily is always looking forward to her next adventure.

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An African encounter in Nigeria

‘No Health without Mental Health’ the signboard read as our well worn car trudged towards the entrance. An eight hour journey from Abuja ended in the rust red roads of Edawu. A team of 3 mental health professionals from UK trying to make a difference to mental health services in Southern Nigeria was an experience that leaves a mark on one’s life.

The lush green fields around Edawu mental health rehabilitation centre brought an air of calm to the setting, more therapeutic than any psychiatric ward I have seen in the UK. The air was fragranced with lemon blossoms. ‘You have to see the stars,’ said one of my colleagues who had travelled there before. ‘They appear huge and there are shooting stars every five minutes’. The way to experience this was apparently an early morning walk. It took me a day or two fight off the jet lag and fatigue. One morning I set my alarm at 5 am and shook off the slumber to take to the dusty roads. John had been right. The stars were huge, unlike anything I had seen before, blazing with a fire that seemed to light up the chill in the air. A few minutes and I had seen my first shooting star with delighted glee. I was not alone.

There were workers building a tarmac road. They had huddled around a fire with cups of tea. As I passed them, they shouted out good morning greetings in the local language, reacting with pleasure when I shouted back in their own tongue. I might have been invited to share a cuppa with them but I would not know- my Igedi language skills ended with the basic greetings. The sky turned lighter as I kept walking, a rosy hint lit up the horizon when I decided to turn back. This time it was a Chinese man in a white van who stopped to say ‘Good morning’. Yes even the roads in Edawu were being ‘Made in China’. The Chinese contractor seemed relieved when I explained the reason for my presence in the area- no competition to him. I stopped in my tracks to watch a brilliant sunrise. John had not told me that even the sun looked bigger here. I might have looked a little lost, or maybe my jaw was dropping but a kindly village woman with a basket of wood over her head stopped near me to say hello.

What she said next was unexpected. ‘Do you believe in God?’ ‘What!’ was my first slightly surprised reply, wondering if I had heard right. After all, it is not everyday that strangers stop by you and ask about your beliefs. ‘Yes,’ I answered after a moment of hesitation. ‘Always keep your faith in God and you will overcome every trouble,’ she ended with an indulgent smile and a pat on my shoulders as she continued on her journey. I looked back at her disappearing figure, faded mended skirt, worn slippers and callused feet. Suddenly my Adidas sneakers felt a little out of place.

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The touch of human genuineness in Egypt

The eerie lack of crowds was fast becoming a theme on this exotic holiday. Our reassuring guide, Samir and his impeccable travel arrangements did not completely take away the niggling thought of some disaster lurking round the corner which we must have been oblivious to whilst planning, in contrast to the cautious who had chosen to avoid this sunny destination in political turmoil. As we landed in Edfu, one mellow February afternoon, we were too conscious of the hungry looks of the Egyptian drivers, sizing up possibly the only tourists of the day. Their colourfully decorated horses tapped impatiently, adding to the background music of a developing tension. Samir skilfully crowded us into a single carriage to make sure we were all under his guarding gaze, and off our horses trotted into the narrow, dusty streets of Edfu.

Fifteen crazy minutes of balancing none too agile bodies on an overcrowded carriage and we were at the gates of an ancient Egyptian temple. Vendors milled around, coaxing for custom in a drought of tourism. A little Egyptian boy, not more than eight years old, joined the throng. Whilst others gave up, he persisted with his blue stone studded bracelets and whiny cajoling. We waved him off with scant attention and perhaps a little first world arrogance, focussing our senses on the grand monument before us. My daughter had fallen behind a few steps.

As she ran to join us, she showed me a bracelet on her wrist. ‘Where did that come from?’ I asked her with exasperation. ‘He gave it to me’, she said pointing at the little boy with his bracelets. “He said, ‘You got pretty smile, here take this as a gift!’ I did not know what to do”, she finished with a slightly confused, slightly abashed shrug of her young shoulders. Annoyed with his persistence, I told her to return the ‘gift’ immediately. He refused with a look I could not read. I turned to Samir for help sure that the boy (or his Dad!) would come pestering for a cost very soon. Cheap as the stuff was, I did not appreciate what I perceived to be underhandedness. For once Samir failed as well, the boy stood resolute. I decided to give up and pay him a few pounds to satisfy my consumer conscience. He refused again. A stream of indignant Arabic followed which Samir translated as ‘I gave it as a gift.

I won’t take it back and I won’t take money for it’. Temple tour over, we boarded our carriage to ride back to the dock where our luxury ship awaited. The boy stood at a distance, waving pointedly at my daughter. He made no eye contact with the rest of us. No one came chasing for a price till the end. Back on our luxury ship on the Nile, I asked Samir if he had come across any similar experience in the past. ‘No,’ he said with a pause. It had been a unique act of graceful giving with no expectations. We would never forget his human kindness. The bracelet sits on my daughter’s dressing table, a reminder of a proud Egyptian boy who was no pestering vendor but a host in his country, giving a gift to an innocent who smiled at him.

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The Gratitude Passport: Friends Collected

I first met Kate in a coffee shop in Portland, Maine, where our friend Jason worked. I was sitting at the bar, reading the last ten pages of The Foremost Good Fortune and Kate leaned over and said, “Oh, I loved that book.” I told her I was about to head downtown to hear the author, Susan Conley, speak. Jason looked at both of us and said, “You two don’t know each other? You should know each other.” I invited Kate to join me, and she agreed. It was March, so we kept a brisk pace down the snowy streets of Munjoy Hill toward Longfellow Books, chatting about our respective jobs—she, a nurse, I, a teacher—trying to keep warm and not slip as the evening faded into gloaming.

We exchanged phone numbers after the reading under the glow of a street lamp and I remember thinking about the kind strength that emanated from her. We saw each other again a month later and sporadically over the course of the spring. I had no idea then that in the summer she would move to Nigeria to work for Doctors Without Borders and I would move to Spain to teach at an international high school, but move we did. In November, Nurse Kate came to visit me in my new home of Barcelona. We strolled the streets together, more slowly than our first walk, thanks to the warmer climate. I took her to my newly discovered favorite dive bar for tortilla, pimientos de padrón and pan con tomate. She bought mushrooms at the market while I was at work, cooked them with sage and butter and served them over pasta. We drank red wine, skyped with Jason and forgot that a less than a year before we didn’t even know the other existed. The next year, Nurse Kate moved to Rwanda for a different job.

In February, I flew to Kigali to visit her and, after a few days in the city, we took a bus west to Lake Kivu. There was still a slice of daylight when we arrived, so we went for a swim. We talked about Maine and how if you squinted away the tropical flowers, the rolling hills of Rwanda and tree-covered islands in Lake Kivu looked a lot like home. I remember saying, “If anyone had stopped me that day in the coffee shop and said, ‘In two years, you two will be floating in a lake in Rwanda together,’ I would have laughed.” And yet. There we were, laughing together almost 7,000 miles from Hilltop Coffee. We swam to shore quickly; twilight does not linger on the equator as it does in New England. I have been fortunate enough to travel all over the world on a teacher’s salary. I’ve driven across the United States and around Iceland. I’ve hiked in Nepal and skied in France.

I’ve eaten salted cod in Lisbon and soaked in geothermal water in the Azores. I have read hundreds of books on public transit, in the air and on ferries, beaches and mountains. I have carried gratitude for my health and good fortune with me along with my passport, journal and a pen. This past April, Nurse Kate, Jason and I rendezvoused in Copenhagen, where we rented bikes and cycled around the city, admiring spring flowers and two-wheeled rush hour. We pulled over at one point to check the map, and found ourselves in front of a store with an English sign: Friends Collected. We didn’t go inside. We didn’t need to. We all felt it, a feeling we had carried with us for years, suddenly labeled: friends collected. Adventure is thrilling, travel is life giving but true friendship is about safety and love. It survives distance and jetlag, broken toes and broken hearts. Wherever and whenever we find ourselves together, collected, laughing about an old joke or troubleshooting an itinerary problem, cooking dinner in Portland or trying to read a menu in a foreign tongue, if I just stop for a moment I can feel my heart within my chest, not just beating but swelling, grateful and free. I feel most thankful in my heart.

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