Today’s post is by guest blogger and friend Linda Feltes. Linda Feltes is a team leader with Xperitas (formerly Global citizens Network) She has ten years experience co-leading groups on cultural immersion travel trips in the US and abroad, in addition to her fulltime job with the State of Minnesota.
I learn something new every time I leave the US. When I went to Bermuda in high school, I learned that the ocean can be as turquoise as in posters. I also learned I like to ride fast and spin out on mini bikes. When I went to Mexico in graduate school, I wished I had worked harder to learn other languages—people actually speak them and knowing their language is a way to get to know them better. (I’m not stupid, just naive.) I lost an acquaintance in a mudslide in Nepal. That was where I learned that mountains have ages, and the Himalayas are young and impetuous.
As significant as these learnings were, the most poignant one came on a volunteer trip in Tanzania. I was in my early 30s. I was to catch up with my team and the high school students from the village to work in a field. That was the work the students did every afternoon. I didn’t know which direction to head, so I followed some elementary students, hoping they were headed to the same place. Amidst these students—and these were young children, mind you—I felt afraid. I was the only white person in a group of black…children. I was afraid because I was racist. And I was forever alerted to it.
When George W. Bush was re-elected, a resounding thought was “I have to get people out of this country”. I think we spend too much of our lives in the bubble of our culture and it’s imperative to expand our views, to learn about other people and about ourselves. My vehicle was Global Citizens Network, now Xperitas. I trained to be a team leader and have since led trips to White Earth Nation, Thailand, Tanzania, Guatemala and Mexico.
Last June I co-lead a trip of 24 members to a northern Thailand hill tribe village. The team was from California. Almost all of the 24 team members were high school students and knew each other and their chaperone very well. Unfortunately, most of them had experienced the drowning of a friend on a volunteer trip with a separate organization just weeks earlier. Emotions were on the surface, sleep was hard, and trust had to be earned. I find leading to be challenging on most trips, for reasons as varied as the team members and team sites. My most difficult struggles are internal –fear and insecurity. Because I’ve carried fear and insecurity with me for as long as I can remember; they are part of me. So I greet them, and in this case, write about them. This trip was a particular struggle for me though. One morning I took a break in my host family’s home, and wrote:
May I do nothing (6/11/17)
May I do nothing,
May I stop?
Nothing’ could be looking
Out from our porch at the hills.
I’ll stop. (Pause.)
If I stop, I sort through
Some insecurity.
I cool down.
Grandma sits by me. (Pause.)
If I stop, I hear voices
Talking while peeling lychee fruit
Next door. (Pause.)
If I stop, I see the grey
And white of the sky.
Of life. (Pause.)
I feel like crying, but
The tears won’t come.
It’s been years since I’ve cried
After years of crying.
If I stop, I can close my eyes.
I’m tired and have a headache.
Opening them, I see our wet clothes
On hangers in the area set aside
For us.
I see Grandma taking careful
Routine care of herself
And remember her cleaning specks from the floor
For herself, for her family, for us.
Stopped (Pause.)
I see kids dancing down the red clay road
Each with a bright red hibiscus
Flower in hand.
Roosters crow
The banter and peeling continues,
Grandma eats.
(Pause.) I’m glad I stopped.
Other states, other lives, other souls 