Longitude

Our first car ride to Gumallapaddu Village was the perfect formula for paradise: the sun shining overhead, a gentle breeze flowing through the window, and the kind of vast landscape that you’d imagine when listening to Toto’s “Africa.”  Every so often a holy cow would roam casually into the path of our jeep, which coming from Los Angeles, never ceased to amaze me.  As we neared Gumallapaddu, the car suddenly came to a stop—the entire village had come out to greet us! As we descended from the car, a group of children presented us with flower garlands and threw petals into the air—it felt like coming home.

As we spent more time in the village, I gained a better understanding of why writers like Tolstoy had romanticized the agrarian lifestyle.  Working each day under the warmth of the sun, surrounded by lush greenery and the glistening water of fish plantations, I could feel God’s love for man expressed through his creation.  I also experienced the satisfaction of using my body to create something tangible, rather than the lesson plans, speeches, and essays of my daily life.  I wondered whether or not progress had somehow shortchanged people of the developing world of a slower pace of life where relationships between neighbors, friends, and family could be adequately nurtured and maintained.
According to the U.S. State Department, there are 194 countries in the world.  Even though I have only visited four of those countries, I am fully convinced that overseas travel is an essential part of the process of becoming a global citizen.  The Longitude website’s quote from Maya Angelou best expresses my feelings after returning from India, “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all people cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”  It is my hope that, like this quote says, that when the rich befriend the poor, the strong befriend the weak, and the free befriend those living in captivity, we will be able to realize that our struggle for achieving human rights throughout the world is one and the same