A REASON TO TRAVEL: CHILDREN

On the road, it is often a loving stranger who illustrates that, at our best, we are all brothers and sisters and friends, even if we have never met before.  This is one reason I have offered the following plea to many of my fellow Americans:  if your health and financial means allow, travel abroad at least once in your life.  Then, once you are away from your familiar surroundings, look thoughtfully into the eyes of a stranger -- even perhaps into the eyes of your enemy, if you happen to be in such a place -- and then listen attentatively to the words he or she may speak.

There are many good reasons to travel, and I wish I had the time to list them all now. But this post is dedicated to only one:  meeting the world's children.  I'm speaking of kids like the young novice above, whom I met at a Buddhist monastery in Myanmar in 2004.  Of course, I'm speaking of a few billion other kids too... 

...like these Palestinian girls in the West Bank town of Jericho

...and this infant in the West Bank village of Zababdeh.

I'm also speaking of children in places like India (above) and Laos (below).  Travel reminds us that love is universal, that it is something of a mystery, and that it is often strongest between a parent a child.

Travel does other things too.  Late one night in August 2004, while visiting Kathmandu, Nepal, I was the victim of theft.  I lost the next four months of traveling money, a notebook full of interviews I had done in Tibet and Laos, a camera, and more.  The experience was like being punched in the solarplexis, for I was on a tight budget and had plans to use the notes for a book I would write.

Less than 15 hours after being robbed, however, I was taken into the home of the family above.  They were what we in the West would call "poor" (though there are forms of poverty other than financial, and many of us with money in the bank are poor in our own ways).  This family was rich in the heart, and they insisted I spend the night in their home "since one needs family in times like these."  That evening, the girls suggested we play tag in a nearby plot of trees.  Pushpa, pictured on the left, insisted on holding my hand as we walked, and it was not clear to me which of us was the child.  Perhaps we both were.  Or perhaps neither of us was.  But I knew I was learning something about life through both the trauma of losing my "stuff" and the incredible kindness toward a stranger that these girls and their mother were showing me.

Travel may also introduce us to the difficult situations in which some children grow up.  Travel allows us to experience something of their world with our own flesh and blood.  And perhaps, in some modest way, travel may even allow us to bring an element of beauty into their troubled lives.  The girl above is a Palestinian living in Jenin refugee camp.  Most weeks of her life she has gone to bed to the sound of gunfire, and she has probably smelled death and spent explosives.  And yet she smiles.

And this girl lives in the the Nepalese town of Pokhara.  That is, she calls home a place that has some of the world's grandest scenery (the Himalayas) but also, during my visit in 2004, was in the midst of Asia's bloodiest civil war.

And this kid lives in Cambodia, a country that lost an estimated 21% of its population to the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970, and, earlier in that same decade, lost at least 100,000 civilians to U.S. bombing.  Today the country struggles with back-breaking poverty, has thousands of children working in brothels, and is full of corruption.  That is to say, this too is a place worth visiting, just like Jenin and Pokhara are worth visiting, because in all these places we can look into the children's eyes.  Then, perhaps, we will find ourselves compelled to grab a mirror so that we can look into our own eyes.  Perhaps we will even be compelled to examine how we live our lives, and why.

I could write more, but I'll close with my plea:  if you are able, at some point in your life (the earlier the better), travel.  And if you do indeed decide to travel, don't just see the monuments and don't just do what is comfortable.  Go deeper than that.  Be a pilgrim perhaps, a seeker, and let your journey take you to one of our world's most important sights: the children.

 Hue, Vietnam