Experiences and stories about teaching English, building stoves, and caring for children around the world.
Has life sped up? The days, weeks, and months whip past faster than I can count. I landed in Oaxaca, Mexico in January. Two months later, I’m settled but restless. Does that even make sense? Traveling is a hard habit to break. I bought a coffee cup when I arrived. It was a small concession …
After months in Africa this past spring, which was a tough trip for me, I spent summer on a hiatus from A Little Adrift and instead headed to the beach with my nieces and nephews, hiked a bit in the Pacific Northwest, spoke at convention in Atlanta, dinner-ed with friends in Florida, and lost myself in the …
Rain pelted darts of moisture into my skin as we stumbled off the bus into a huddle of quizzical faces. A slice of doubt entered my mind at their complete bafflement, but within moments the bus handler had hurled our luggage under the shelter and sped down the road, leaving Ana, my dad, and me …
Writing this book over the past nine months functioned as a perfect mirror for my own personal fears and vulnerabilities—my book about volunteering ended up with so much of me exposed in the process that the thought of publicly launching was overwhelming. When I left the United States in 2008 on what became my open-ended …
There is a textbook definition of the word “journey”: an act or instance of traveling from one place to another. Within the framework of our collective consciousness as people, however, the true meaning of a journey lies within ourselves. The word can imply the growth of very specific ideas and understanding within a set time …
Our pickup truck bumped and jostled down the unpaved path, the driver from Feynan Ecolodge weaving around deep pits and potholes by rote, each piece of this desert clearly as familiar to him as the lines on his darkly tanned hands. For twenty-five minutes we plodded a slow path through stark and open plains and …
The smell of burning wood hit me first as I ducked through the entrance of the small house – ducking saved my head from earning yet another gash and also put me right at eye level with the beaming smile from the Guatemalan woman nervously wringing her hands in the center of the room. As …
Two weeks ago, I was playing around on Facebook as a way to procrastinate the real work I should have been doing when a chat window popped up—from a sweet young woman I met at the orphanage in Cambodia where I volunteered more than a year and a half ago. Then, a decade later, it …