This is a post about the person I’ve become since taking off to Vietnam exactly a year ago today, May 24, 2012. Vietnam was a grueling adventure filled with more anxiety, angst, stress and tears than I expected. It was the journey of self-discovery that we all secretly want, tempered with larger-than-self responsibilities that come part-and-parcel with charity and NGO work. The four months I spent living like a nomad in the country of my heritage were equal parts thrilling, exhausting and isolating.
This is not the original post. My original one was filled with woe-is-me rhetoric. “I can’t have joy and not question it,” “There’s an interminable guilt swallowing me whole,” and more of such nonsense. It was poignant and honest, but self-indulgent and verbose. Also, defensively self-pitying. I queued it to publish for this morning, and then realized after reading it again what an annoying twit I am.
The truth is that travel changes you. Specifically voluntourism, the new vogue for privileged Western/North American folks. Everybody and their mom has been to a country in the global South, taken pictures with village children and come back with ethnic clothing and a tan. The majority are happy and invigorated. They post pictures up on Facebook and talk about what an amazing experience their trip to the Third World was and their friends and family are so proud of them. And the people that haven’t gone want to go (and those who don’t are heartless human beings).
People have come back from these trips with renewed energy and newfound appreciation for life, thankful for their experience in the global South but otherwise still removed from it, locking their memories up in a tiny corner at the back of their mind. And others have loved their trips so much that they dream of the opportunity to return to those villages to play with the children. They can’t wait to go back.
I wasn’t a voluntourist, but an actual volunteer—working for four straight months. And though my experience was significantly different, I take issue with the fact that I didn’t reap the same rewards as the voluntourist majority.
Let me briefly illustrate.
From the moment I stepped foot back in Canada—my home—I have felt more and more like I don’t belong here, boiling down to my diminished tolerance of the perceived problems of my middle- to upper-class peers. I avoided company and threw myself in my studies (and am pleased to report that this has been the most rigorous and rewarding year in my academic career thus far). Connecting with people became a Herculean challenge, resulting in the breakdown of many friendships. I have cried more this year than I have in the past five and can’t be away from my family too long without experiencing tremendous sadness and deprivation. My health, as a result, has suffered.
On one level, I’ve gained clarity, as if a layer has been peeled off the world’s surface, exposing the truth and importance of everyone I meet and everything I do. It’s a difficult concept to understand if you haven’t gone through what I have last summer in a similar context. And so on that same vein, no one I know quite understands me anymore. I’ve matured and evolved in so many inexplicable ways and yet nothing else has, nothing else can.
And yet, on another level, I’m baffled as to what I’m supposed to do with this new fountain of knowledge. How do I adjust to home when everything is so unchanged? My everyday circumstances haven’t caught up to me yet, and so I’m forced to wear the pretense of normalcy and stability while I itch for the tangible life-changes and transformations I so desperately need to complete—or at the very least, continue—what Vietnam started. The gods dangle those jewels in front of me but keep them just out of my reach.
The solutions are simple, right? Either suck it up and be grateful for your experience, or else leave. If life ain’t good in Canada anymore, then pack your bags and go back to Vietnam.
Ah, but I can’t. I don’t belong there either.
If I look back to my state of mind this time last year, I was pumped. This was the trip I had been waiting for. I was travelling for the first time without my family (at least, for the first month. They would join me later.) all the way to the other end of the earth. I was so ready to meet the beneficiaries of all the charity work I’d been doing the previous four years, as well as for a change of scenery and a transformation of character that I didn’t even lament being away from all the people I love or even the break-up of the best relationship I had been in thus far.
Well, I gave up four months of my life to a country I barely knew (having claim to only my ancestry and the colour of my skin) and it nearly broke me. If I knew this before my trip, would I still have willingly gone? (“Willingly” only because my mother would have forced me anyway.) I don’t know. I flipped my entire world upside-down and have nothing to show it but stamps on my passport, an increase in mental breakdowns and a complete changing of life-goals and academic pursuits that have yet to take shape.
I think the real question is, if I went back in time, would I have preferred not to have gone and lived only vaguely aware of the sufferings of humanity or go and experience another world but then live with the painful knowledge of my privileged upbringing and concomitantly, feel guilty for it for the rest of my life? Because I could have been any of the kids I visited, if circumstances were just a little bit different. I don’t know what the choice would be. I only know that the latter option, the one I’m living with right now, isn’t easy. I’ll come back next year to let you know if it’s been worth it.
