Pero...Porque???

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