I started going on trips every summer when I was in middle school. I went somewhere new every summer from 7th grade through my senior year in high school.
There were usually about 30 of us, sometimes more, that went as a part of our youth group.
I was under the illusion, we were under the illusion, that service projects and day camps were meeting the needs of the communities that we invaded - an incursion of midwestern kids sent to be the answers to the prayers of every place we ever went.
Those trips were the highlight of my summer, of my teenage years, for as long as I lived under the canopy of my religious upbringing.
All of that started to change for me when I went to college. The thin veneer of religion that I had covered myself with for the first 17 years of my life had shattered, along with my identity.
I spent the next couple years figuring out what I thought of the world, of myself, and rebuilding my life, but it wasn’t until I started teaching that I truly felt grounded.
I left the shelter of the right and wrong to find a new world, a new me. In so many ways those were some of the most formative years of my life. I teetered between what I had been indoctrinated with as a kid and what I was coming to understand as a grown adult - years of breaking apart the foundation that I had stood on to form a new base for myself.
Deconstruction.
I threw myself into science and history and philosophy and quantum physics and energy fields, re-examining story and relationship through these new lenses.
It’s an ongoing process in my life that leaves me saying, “I don’t really know what I think about that yet.” on a daily basis.
I am in a constant state of reconstruction.
What do I want to hold on to from the days of my childhood? What still fits in my worldview? What doesn’t? What did I learn from my past that serves my present? What do I need to bury for the rest of my existence on this planet?
My grad school program was instrumental in helping me stitch the pieces of my former life together with the life I was (am) in the process of creating. It was through this program that I was able to marry the ideal of serving others with empowerment and sustainability.
I learned how to enter a community as an expert with a specific skill equipped to meet a predetermined need. I learned how to see the assets already within the community and equip those living there to see their own strength.
I learned to go with as a conduit, not as the benevolent source.
It’s embarrassing to even say those words, to admit the mindset that I had for so long, but its part of my story and most of the reason that I defer to having more questions than answers in my daily life.
I leave for Nigeria in the middle of the night. My eighth trip with BuildaBridge. My eighth year of practicing the value of serving others in a way that empowers, as opposed to contributing to the systems of oppression already in motion throughout the world.
This year will be different than the seven previous years, though each year is always unique.
This year I am not going alone. I am taking one of the most precious people in my life, my niece.
She starts 7th grade in less than a month, her journey of world travel starting nearly the exact same time in her life that I started my own. Only, she isn’t going with me in order to serve or help or fix or provide.
She is going to observe, to learn, to experience.
She is going to meet new people, to live in a new culture, to see a new world.
She is going without delusions of grandeur, a privilege afforded to her because of the mistakes of the generation before her.
She will have a more stable foundation to build upon, just as I had a more stable one than the generation before me.
Lily will have her own deconstruction at some point, I’m sure. I hope. But, hers will not be what mine was. Hers will be more evolved. Hers will help her help the generation after her in a capacity that I will not be able to. Evolution is slow. We stand on the shoulders of those that came before us, more specifically those whose lives intertwine with our own.
Her life will help those that come after her to not make the mistakes that will be an inevitable part of her journey, just as mine is an attempt to give her a life without repeating the mistakes that I made at her age.
I will be with her as we go, both in Nigeria and in life, helping her process along the way, helping her think through what she’s learning as her 12-and-a-half-year-old brain works through this major life experience.
This kid changed my entire world from the moment that I found out that she was the size of a sunflower seed in my sister’s womb and now I have one of the opportunity to take her across the globe with me.
I have made a conscious effort to savor every moment of this experience from the second we started planning in April.
I’m headed across the world with this little life that taught me to love in a capacity that I didn’t know was possible. I’m humbled by the privilege and the gravity of it is not lost on me.
Her experience will be vastly different from the one that I had at her age, which is progress - for her, for me, for the future.
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