Can travel make one a liberal?

The seas are rough, the wind is howling and the boat is rocking. We had a pretty awful dinner at the specialty restaurant last night and the ship has been running out of things from spinach to berries, diet coke in cans to some beers and wines, crackers and bar snacks and, god forbid, fresh baked cookies. While the evening entertainment has been very good, with the many sea days we are having, the mornings and afternoons are pretty devoid of things to do unless you are into "Caravans and RV's", "Carpet Bowls", "Needpoint and Knitting", or "Trivia" ad naseum. They've only had "Jackpot Bingo" once on the trip and some of the natives are really getting restless.

Then there are the tours in rickety, dirty windowed, broken seat, non-air conditioned buses on either traffic jammed, polluted streets or rutted dirt roads. Guides with thick accents and no PA systems. Water that is warm, if provided, at all, and constant complaining from people with British, Austrailian or New Zealand accents, (I can't tell them apart), about everything, but especially that the French contingent wrangled the only air conditioned bus in Benin.

This all came to me as I was sitting at my iPad, in our lovely suite, enjoying a Diet Coke in a can, munching on fresh baked peanut butter cookies (perks of being in a suite) and trying to sort through pictures of street life in Cotonou, Benin. What do we have to complain about? We've been going through some countries where the people have little power to change things and struggle every day, maybe not to merely survive, but to make some kind of life for themselves and their families. The pictures and reflecting on the past few weeks were getting to me. Why all the complaining when life just off the boat was so tough, but the people so warm and welcoming?

Life in these countries is lived on the street for most of the population, but especially in the cities. While the main road is paved, the side streets quickly turn to dirt and along the sides of both, paved and unpaved roads, people try to make a living.

 

Virtually everything one can think of is sold on the street and some things you can't imagine are as well.

 

That's not soda, beer or olive oil being sold in those bottles, but gasoline. We saw few gasoline stations, but vendors selling gas by the bottle were everywhere.

Produce was everywhere as well, but we saw little meat, poultry or fish. Grains and yams make up a large portion of the diet.

Then there was the merchandise. Here there are no Walmarts, Targets or Macy's. You want something, you find it being sold by the side of the road.

 

 

 

If all that shopping made you hungry, no problem. There are plenty of eateries right by the side of the road and also the ice cream man pushing his cart.

Then you have to carry your goods home and unlike in some East Africa countries, both the men and the women use their heads to get this done.

 

Travel may not make one a liberal, certainly not me, but what it can do is open one's eyes, slap you aside the head and make you more sensitive to people's conditions. It forces you to see so many different aspects of life that you'd never come into contact with if you didn't have that passport. The lessons learned may be immediate or remembered at a later date, but one does learn and change. Empathy is heightened.

From the Eiffel Tower to the Killing Fields, from the Metropole Hotel in Venice to the one in Hanoi, from the Polar Bears in Churchill to the Lions in Botswana, we been blessed to be able to experience so much. I hope we bring some smiles to your faces and that you enjoy journeying with us.

 

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