Let the world change you ...

Che Guevara said in The Motorcycle Diaries: "Deje el mundo cambiarle y usted puede cambiar el mundo" ("Let the world change you and you can change the world"). Although these words can inspire a person to think about moving out beyond the boundaries of a familiar and often stultifying culture, the truth they contain can only be experienced by actually taking the trip. How does letting the world change us make us better able to change the world?

It's not just the physical act of placing ourselves into the unfamiliar surroundings of another country, of an unfamiliar, "third world" culture, that creates change at the deepest level of our experience. The change begins to happen when we move out beyond the limitations of what is normal to us into a social landscape that features people who, although they want to make us feel welcomed, wouldn't even begin to know how to make us feel comfortable and esteemed. They've never had the experience of being treated the way we're accustomed to being treated. And even if they knew, they couldn't afford to approximate the fulfillment of our desires. Getting to know people and learning to see the world through their eyes also gives a chance to see what we look like to them.

Most people in the "third world" world have to put up with us. We are culturally imbued with a sense of superiority. We invade their countries, puffed up with a sense of entitlement, flush with cash and equipped with stuff they can't even dream of owning. Even if we feel pity for them and wish they could participate in "our way of life," we also like them the way they appear to us: simple, colourful and slightly obsequious.

But they see us as we are. And perhaps that's what makes us feel slightly uncomfortable around them. It's only when we become "strangers in a strange land" and begin to see ourselves through the eyes of the "strangers" (to whom we are the extraneros) that we get the priceless opportunity to free ourselves from our delusional sense of superiority. The chance to see a larger reality is one of the most wonderful benefits of traveling in a "third world" country. It helps us to put those things that often disturb us about our home cultures -- our materialism, our consumerism, our laziness -- into the proper perspective. It gives us a clearer vision of what needs to be changed and better ideas about how to change it.

It naturally leads us to think about justice. We have not been educated to think about our experience in the world in terms of justice. We've never been encouraged to wonder why our way of life, and the comforts and conveniences we've learned to expect from it, should be so dependent upon the hard work of the people in the countries we love to visit. We've never been taught to think critically about the distribution of wealth in our world or to wonder why people who live in these lands, with all their natural resources and wonderful climates so well-suited to the production of so many of the things we enjoy and depend upon -- coffee, fruits, minerals -- should be so "backward" in their ability to access the wealth of their own countries.

These are the questions one begins to ask when traveling. These are the topics of discussion among many of the travelers I've met staying in hostels. They will be some of the subjects I will discuss in future blog posts. I hope that anyone who reads this will decide to travel to a "third world" country to have the experience of being changed. The change will do you good.