I am.

I don't know if anyone has noticed or not, but it's an election year.

Election season for me means annoying social media posts, signs in yards, bumper stickers on cars, interns on street corners, divisive conversations, and higher quality Saturday Night Live skits. 

It also means the celebration of a government by the people.  I'm not sure that's as dependable as high quality Saturday Night Live skits and I'm pretty sure Bernie would agree with me.  Maybe it means the celebration of an idea, which is a government that was originally intended to be for the people. 

I digress. 

The point of this specific blog is to confess some aspects of my character that I have noticed through the overlap of world travel and the current election season. 

Election years make it really easy for me to identify people that I want nothing to do with. Put a sign in your front yard with a certain name on and I'll instantly know that we could never be friends.  

I know, in my head, that the sum of an entire human cannot be contained in the endorsement of a candidate. But damn, it's so easy to do that.  

Especially this year. Every endorsement feels like a proverbial wall giving me permission to actively stay on my side of the partition. Attach yourself to a specific candidate and I've given myself permission to write you off. 

I can rationalize it pretty easily.  

I teach in a community of students that are first generation Spanish speaking immigrants. I've spent years working towards helping my kids get citizenship before their 18th birthdays. I've walked that road with them. I know their stories. I'm part of their stories. 

I'm also a woman. And I have a radical idea that my gender is equal to other humans that have different genitals. 

Additionally, I work really hard to use the privilege I was born with, based on skin color, in order to level the playing field for my brothers and sisters that were born into a world of ignorant racism. 

A few more - I think that wealth and resources are to be shared. I think wisdom rests in the most lowly, most disregarded in a society.  I think leaders are meant to serve.  I'm a pacifist that believes in subversive opposition to systems of oppression. 

See? Easy. 

You stay on your side. I'll stay on mine. 

There's just one problem with the ease at which I segregate people of differing viewpoints from myself - It doesn't align with my own value system. 

I operate under the premise that we all have more in common than not.  I go across the globe and see entire cultures that live in a world with no resemblance to my own. 

Politics, culture, worldview, gender roles, societal norms, agriculture, cuisine, rituals - all different. 

The first thing I see, regardless of where I find myself, is all that we have in common.  

Love of family, desire for community, appreciation for celebration, need for expression, respect for the sacred, disdain for disgust. All the same. 

See?  Easy. 

I can spend a month with a group of people, living and laughing and learning one another, to the point that I feel eternally connected.  I feel really good about the world when I think about that, about how we are all so much more alike than any of us realize. 

That's beautiful to me. I want more of that. 

I can live on the same block as someone that I will intentionally avoid meeting based on the sign they have in their window.  I feel really good about myself when I think about that, about how I can write someone off so easily, dismissing them as humans because I think that they are ignorant.

That's abhorrent to me. I don't even want to admit it. 

But, it's true. 

It's true and I need to admit it. I need to say it. I need to address it. I need to weed it out of the garden of my soul. 

I want to see people.  Whole people.  Entire beings. I want to find all that connects me to them, all that we have in common and let that be my starting point. 

No labels.  No branding. No generalizations.  No categories.  No affiliations. 

Just human. 

I have to work on that. 

If I don't, I'm just adding to the problem. I'm just adding to the "us vs. them" world that I actively work to piece back together. 

The problem, I suppose, is that I don't want to have anything in common with these people.  I want to arrogantly state how ignorant they are and how different I am because of that. 

And I guess, that makes me the problem.  

I am the problem. 

It's an odd revelation to have, especially when I'm walking through Kibera, the largest slum in all of Africa, and actively seeing every commonality between myself and the people living here. 

But if I can't do it at home, what's the point of being here at all?

I have to work on that. 

I suppose if I do, if I work on that, I can be the solution, too.

Giving Birth

I don't have any kids, at least not any that required me to give birth. I have an entire school of kids for 10 months every year and I have a niece and a nephew (see photo) for always. That's good enough for me. I know that there are women that don't get that. I know that not having an intense burning desire to carry, deliver, and mother my very own children isn't something that most people understand. Add it to all of the other reasons that make me a square peg.

 It's fine. I embrace it.

For me, spending a month in a foreign country every year is my very own version of giving birth. 

I suppose that that thought was originally planted in my head after my first trip abroad in the summer of 2012. I remember being in Colombia after 6 weeks away from everything that I had ever known and desperately wanting to go home. I was deep in the Andes debriefing my experience and I thought, “This is probably going to be a once in a lifetime experience. I'll probably never do this again.”

Then the next summer after I came back from Israel (round 1) I swore I would never go back. In fact, I remember walking the streets of Jerusalem for two straight days and thinking, “Soak all of this in. You'll never be back.”

I spent the summer of 2015 walking those same streets.

Today, I leave for Kenya for the second time in three years. And yes, the pattern is the same for my Kenyan experience. I thought I would never go back.  Yet, I'm 45 minutes from putting my backpack in a car and heading to the airport.

When I think back to all of my summers for the past 4 years I keep replaying my sister's voice in my head after she gave birth to my niece. I remember sitting in her living room with her first tiny offspring in her hands, just a few days old, and listening to her tell me that she was glad that she didn't have to make any decisions on future children in that moment. She said that if women had to decide about getting pregnant again just after they just had a child, that no one would have more than one kid in their family. The pain is too great to conceive of willingly giving birth a second time. But then, time passes, the memory of the pain dissipates, and the beauty of the life that was birthed is so great that it makes you want another one.

That's why I have a nephew, I guess.

I feel like that after every trip. I feel like I'll never do it again. There are so many parts that are too difficult to conceive of wanting to do a second time. Specifically, the thought of returning to the same country is unthinkable, especially at the tail end of a trip. And yet, here I am, going back to Kenya in a matter of hours.

It's giving birth.

The product of traveling to a new country for a month creates a different version of myself, one that is born from this new experience. I have to strip myself of all of the comforts and amenities of my daily life, lose the routine that the hold so sacred, and figure out who I am all over again.

It's painful. It's hard.

It changes me. It makes me new.

It breaks me. It rebuilds me.

Every year I think that i'll never go back, at least not to the same country that I just left. But enough time passes, enough space elapses between the old me and the new me for me to see the value in repeating the experience.

So I go. Again and again - to the point that I don't know who I would be without the losing and the finding of myself over the past 4, going to be 5 summers.

I guess that makes me about 8 months pregnant right now. Late in the last trimester, ready for a month of labor.

Ready to break the old me and reform the new one.

I won't know what she looks like for a couple of months, because it takes some time for her to grow. But I know she'll be a better version of anything I've known so far. A better version for the world, for my friends, for my neighborhood, for my students, for my family, and for myself.

So I go.