To break down stereotypes.
To undo the learning in your head.
To learn that you have a lot to learn.
To taste how foods are prepared by other people’s hands.
To drink local juices, brews, concoctions with the people.
To know how a place smells and not just how it looks.
To be discomforted.
To feel what it’s like to not understand what someone is saying.
To feel the satisfaction of communicating with someone whose language you do not speak.
To better recognize from where it is that you come from.
To realize the arbitrariness of political borders.
To find that humanity’s borders are non-existent, unless we create them.
To get turned around, lost, disoriented.
To be helped by someone who sees that we need it, and as a result, have a new found trust in “strangers.”
To wake up in a bed that isn’t familiar, and be excited and a little afraid about the unknown that awaits outside the door.
To see the differences in how people live, and learn to accept them, and eventually celebrate them by adopting some of those ways into your own life.
To see what makes people smile on planet Earth.
To walk in forests, deserts, grasslands, mountains new to you.
To swim in oceans, lakes and rivers that your skin hasn’t touched.
To assist in making the world a better place for all of us to live by working side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder with each other, sharing our skills and determining, together, rich and poor, “educated” and “uneducated,” how to answer a call of need.
