Be Inspired By This Young Girl Transformed Through Travel
Like every parent, I want my kids to have a great life. I hope they discover what they’re passionate about and pursue their dreams and build lives that are filled with love and laughter. And while it’s easy to share these parental hopes with other parents, I’ve discovered that how we as parents, teach our kids about values and beliefs are very different from each other…and we need to be OK with that. In fact we need to celebrate that. This is an inspiring story of how my daughter was transformed through her experiences traveling the world.
In the initial rush of excitement, just days away from hitting the open road for a year with our kids, a fellow parent and professional colleague asked what had brought us to the point where we would willingly destabilize our lives to such a terrible degree. In a million years, I never would have thought anyone would look at it that way. I certainly hadn’t.
It was a light bulb moment for me. We don’t all think the same way about everything. We don’t all learn the same way. We may share certain values…like honesty and integrity, but our beliefs in how we walk those out can be vastly different. My adventure of a lifetime, would be my colleague’s biggest nightmare.
When we started traveling our son Zion was 13 and our daughter Riel was 9 years old. Riel was a quiet and shy homebody. She loved her room, her bed, her stuffies, Barbies and Polly Pockets. She had one friend, just as quiet and shy as she was. It was impossible to imagine how Riel was going to react to a nomadic lifestyle for a year.
I interviewed her recently, and it was so exciting for both of us, to hear her observations as she looked back on her experiences and how they changed her, and empowered her to face the future.
Transformed Through Travel
I interviewed Riel as part of my submission to a World Nomads contest, to travel to Columbia and work with a professional documentary filmmaker. Regardless of the outcome of the submission, I felt like I’d won the lottery as I sat listening to this young woman, describing the way travel had transformed her life.
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