Why do a trip like this? I think we have a lot of different answers for this question, and each one, no matter how unrelated to the others, have something to do with our desire to take this journey. In no specific order, here are some of our thoughts on why we are excited about this trip.
1. One undeniable piece of this desire is our love for travel. While our travel has been mostly limited to Latin America, we really enjoy the culture, the people, the landscape and the adventure. It helps that we both speak Spanish, at least on some level. It also helps that we have friends like Philipp Tavakoli and Steve Craig who have consistently made us immensely jealous of their own stints away from the US.
2. Closely connected to this is a desire to take advantage of our current situation. We are fortunate to be in a place where we are able to leave what we know behind for a while. While we have both traveled short term in the past, we have never spent any extended period of time (more than 3 months) outside of north Carolina.
3. We want to figure out how to live the change we advocate. We are increasingly concerned about global issues, particularly those related to poverty. We live in a country where over consumption of resources is the norm, where destroying the environment in the name of having a vibrant economy and increasing wealth is the American Dream, where the poor both in our own country and throughout the world are seen not as fellow humans, but as a resource to be exploited at any cost. While we (shamefully) enjoy the fruits of this system in the US, our conscience and our faith tradition calls us to do more.
This is a strong statement, and we are not sure where to find the answers for how to live and promote a lifestyle that is more ethical. However, we have a hunch that we can learn where to start from the people who we may consider to be poor. We hope to be learning how agriculture and local economy can play a part in solving pieces of this problem. We hope to gain understanding about how focusing on sustainability can lead to a wiser use of resources assuring that there is enough for everyone. Our past experiences in Latin America have given us a peek into how people in other parts of the world live in community with one another instead of scrambling to exploit one another in the name of economic gain.
This hunch that we might learn some of these valuable things is based in some of our experiences with our own families. Our own parents and grandparents have experienced life in agricultural communities where food on the table came from land that can be seen from the kitchen window and where survival was dependant upon close relationships with the community. However, as technology has promoted greater globalization, we feel much of this has been lost. Instead of bartering canned tomatoes for corn meal, we buy cheap bananas whose low prices are dependant upon the exploitation of the poor in central america and we use foods that have been processed beyond recognition, having environmental impacts that are almost certain to be detrimental to large amounts of humans. Our hope in this travel is to relearn some of what has been lost and to translate this into our current framework in the United States.
Of course the list goes on about why we want to take this trek, but this reflects our current thinking. Hopefully more work on logistics is coming soon, so we will plan to bounce back and forth between philosophy and logistics.
Last week I told everyone to make sure you have seen Motorcycle Diaries. This week, try reading some Wendell Berry. Here is a pretty good article by him http://www.organicconsumers.org/btc/berry.cfm
Friday, March 21, 2008
Thursday, March 6, 2008
The Adventure Begins Now
Nothing is certain yet, but Tracy and I (Adam) are at the beginning stages of planning an adventure. We are hoping for this to serve as a way to communicate with our friends and family about what we are doing while we are away, to help document all the adventures we have along the way, and to give insight into our planning and implementation.
As our blog title suggests, our adventure will include a trip through Central and South America. (If you have not seen Motorcycle Diaries, stop reading now and go rent it immediately). We are not sure how closely our path will follow that of Che and Ernesto, but you get the idea.
Our idea has actually evolved over the last 6-9 months. At the risk of oversimplification, it has been something like this:
Tracy went back to school at the Ag Institute at NCSU. She is loving it and is actually now looking into graduate school in sustainable agriculture/sustainable development. I (Adam) have been working for Child Protective Services for about 2 and a half years. I enjoy my work, but must admit that once my commitment ends in September, I will be ready for a slight change. With Tracy finishing at the Ag Institute and my own commitment to work for CPS for 3 years ending shortly thereafter we began to consider what we might want to do next. We are both terrified of being trapped in a mortgage, or having kids or even pets and feeling weighed down, so we decided we should take advantage of our restlessness, freedom, and youth and plan to do something that may not be feasible down the road.
Plan number 1 was to go live in Guatemala for a year. We both have spent time studying/hanging out in Guatemala and love it there. It was the natural choice as we are familiar with how to live in Guatemala (transportation, housing, eating, currency, Visas, etc.) I was considering employment as a teacher or something interesting while Tracy was looking into working on a Macadamia nut farm that does a lot of work in the communities doing sustainable agriculture type work.
This seemed exciting, but it is also familiar. We both love Latin America and would like to see much more of it. We then ran across an organization called WWOOF. This organization is a network of organic and sustainable farms throughout the world. The farms vary widely in their crops, their purpose, their philospohy and their locations. As we began to think more, learn more, and talk more this became our new goal. While we leave open the idea that our adventure could continue to evolve, this is where we are currently at in our planning.
As it stands now, we have found farms in Argentina, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Mexico. We hope to depart sometime in the fall and spend about a year travelling from farm to farm. Our plan is to fly into southern South America (Chile or Argentina) and work our way back to North Carolina by bus (and boat).
Our thoughts about this and excitement is more complicated than just hoping for a vacation. So hopefully as we plan, we can share more of our thoughts about this on the blog and have a chance to hear the responses of friends and family.
*note- we are both technologically challenged, so hopefully we can figure this thing out along the way and maybe even upload pictures and such as we travel.
As our blog title suggests, our adventure will include a trip through Central and South America. (If you have not seen Motorcycle Diaries, stop reading now and go rent it immediately). We are not sure how closely our path will follow that of Che and Ernesto, but you get the idea.
Our idea has actually evolved over the last 6-9 months. At the risk of oversimplification, it has been something like this:
Tracy went back to school at the Ag Institute at NCSU. She is loving it and is actually now looking into graduate school in sustainable agriculture/sustainable development. I (Adam) have been working for Child Protective Services for about 2 and a half years. I enjoy my work, but must admit that once my commitment ends in September, I will be ready for a slight change. With Tracy finishing at the Ag Institute and my own commitment to work for CPS for 3 years ending shortly thereafter we began to consider what we might want to do next. We are both terrified of being trapped in a mortgage, or having kids or even pets and feeling weighed down, so we decided we should take advantage of our restlessness, freedom, and youth and plan to do something that may not be feasible down the road.
Plan number 1 was to go live in Guatemala for a year. We both have spent time studying/hanging out in Guatemala and love it there. It was the natural choice as we are familiar with how to live in Guatemala (transportation, housing, eating, currency, Visas, etc.) I was considering employment as a teacher or something interesting while Tracy was looking into working on a Macadamia nut farm that does a lot of work in the communities doing sustainable agriculture type work.
This seemed exciting, but it is also familiar. We both love Latin America and would like to see much more of it. We then ran across an organization called WWOOF. This organization is a network of organic and sustainable farms throughout the world. The farms vary widely in their crops, their purpose, their philospohy and their locations. As we began to think more, learn more, and talk more this became our new goal. While we leave open the idea that our adventure could continue to evolve, this is where we are currently at in our planning.
As it stands now, we have found farms in Argentina, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Mexico. We hope to depart sometime in the fall and spend about a year travelling from farm to farm. Our plan is to fly into southern South America (Chile or Argentina) and work our way back to North Carolina by bus (and boat).
Our thoughts about this and excitement is more complicated than just hoping for a vacation. So hopefully as we plan, we can share more of our thoughts about this on the blog and have a chance to hear the responses of friends and family.
*note- we are both technologically challenged, so hopefully we can figure this thing out along the way and maybe even upload pictures and such as we travel.
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