Learning from the world blog 2014

Today we are spending the day in Surabaya, Indonesia just outside of the airport. Billy is out on a walk to hunt down food, while I stay home with a fever working to kick one of the many new illnesses we have come into contact with since we started our travels. The closest food it has been told is a market and then some 'western options' that we have not had access to for a number of weeks in more remote Indonesia: Pizza Hut, McDonalds, or KFC. Its nice to have gotten off the beaten track enough this last little bit of time that having these fast food monsters is a novelty now instead of a norm. I have so many thoughts to share about our travels and am only now just starting this blog. I will attempt to put thoughts into a digestable format, but also look forward to just having a more regular journalling outlet- I strangely am more comfortable typing that writing by hand at this point in my life. This trip needs an introduction perhaps. Over two years ago Billy and I met and fell in love. We spent our first 'Holiday' Season together in the DR and Haiti on a whim, since we had to buy tickets to get there after only a few months together. I guess you just know when its right. It was somewhere along the way to or from that trip that Billy started planting the seed of travelling around the world someday. I was game, if less confident that we would ever be able to work out all the details to make it a reality. Throughout the process, I began to learn firsthand how determined my new partner could be when he wanted to make a dream a reality. We bought laminated maps and put them up on our wall, putting different colored stickers up for places we had each been, been to together, and finally, where we wanted our trip to take us. This was all the dream stage, with no real idea of what kind of money travelling around the world would take. We probably marked two to three times more places off on the map than we were eventually able to afford to go to. We lived off of my income while saving most of Billy's, still holding out for the last and very important point: my job. I was not at all confident that my job would allow me a six month leave of absence, and didn't want to loose my position at the organization I work for and have never felt so at home and impassioned by- SEIU Local 105. My job there has always felt like the right place, doing the right thing, and for the first time ever, it was with the right people. I couldn't walk away from that! But a great blessing came, in the form of a boss who believes in the work we do for progressive working conditions. She said that as a woman in her 30s beginning a new relationship as well, she knew all too well what it means to be a woman in the workforce and have to choose between having a family or having a job. She had seen female co-workers derailed from the professional track they were on when they had to take maternity leave, and how this tore up these strong women. She believed that we should be able to have a profression we care and are passionate about, and still have a family and home life. She let me take a six month leave and return to the work I love afterwords. I have never had a boss do anything so revolutionary and in line with what we espouse our beliefs to be, and I will always remember her for it. So here we are, four months after my leave of absence began on Sept. 1, and so many experiences later. We started out by travelling to northern Minnesota, where I worked for 3-4 seasons as a wilderness therapist with Outward Bound in the beautiful Boundary Waters Wilderness.I got to show Billy how deep dark the sky can be at night in the greatest lake wildernes in the world, the sound of the call of the loons I love so much, and a place and time that changed and shaped me forever. We then moved on to concerts in Chicago, staying at our gracious friend Arnoldo's apartment, and finally to Ohio for our wedding at Punderson Manor. The wedding was magical with so many friends and family together in one place, and a beautiful place in nature- we'd have it no other way. I am still recovering from the feeling of being surrounded by loved ones to help us step forward together in our lives as committed partners- always wishing it could have been longer. From Cleveland, I got incredibly sick and nursed some strange kind of fever/ illness like I'd never had for over a week, holed up for one point at an expensive hotel in New Jersey, waiting to take our first international flight. That was the beginning of my constant struggle on these travels with my belief in holistic medicine, and the ever present suggeestions of most western doctors to 'just take some antibiotics. Doesn't matter what I have, if they have proof, or which antibiotics.' I worked for a week to burn the fever out of me, absorbing too much of our international budget, taking homeopathic meds, vitamins, but little access to fresh food. Finally I gave in to the evil Cipro, which may have killed off whatever virus I had, but also killed off all of my naturral defenses to the upcoming travel bugs I was soon to encounter. Such a hard choice! From Jersey, we left for Italy, Turkey (our first encounter of many with a Muslim country), Ukraine (where my search for my Jewish family history took me to mass grave sites and all too small memorials to Jewish people killed by the Pograms and the Haulocost), Ethiopia (the home of so many of the beloved SEIU members and an eye opening experience), India (give me some time to think about this place, as I spent most of it sick and seem to hold a grudge against it currently), and now Indonesia. I am the firm believer (from experience) that it is often the experiences that make us the most uncomfortable in the moment that most shape and impact us later in life. Cultural shock is certainly real, and there were a number of places I spent feeling uncomfortable. Uncomfortable for my privilege in my ability to travel while the places we were visiting was full of poverty, for the huge gap in accessibility to education, upward mobility, and opportunity the simple fact of where I was born and where the people we were visiting were born- and the response we saw to some of that- cities where we could never blend in because we were essentially walking around with a big money sign on our foreheads. And then the choice of how to respond to these advances and this real gap. I am sure I will spend more time on this topic in a later post. So here we are in Indonesia. If nothing else, this trip has been the biggest exposure to Muslim culture and to Asian culture that I have ever had. It is now amazing to me how separated from Muslim culture we have been able to be in the United States, considering the incredible influence it has over so, so much of the world. We have spent our time in four out of the last six countries listening to the daily calls from the mosques all over the cities and towns we spend time in. That beautiful and mysterious call (since we don't know what they are saying) that carries usually over loudspeakers to mix with sounds of the market, whichever foreign language we are hearing around, cars, animals, and our own breathing, multiple times a day. At the guesthouse we are currently staying, it is decisively not Muslime though, as we received roles with bacon and sausage inside for our breakfast (prok is outlawed in Islam). So we see the coexistence of multiple religions side by side here today, if only a few decades ago it was not so peaceful. Well, I suppose this is more than enough of an introduction. Thanks for following our travels. More to come.