You’re waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don’t know for sure, and it doesn’t matter.
Echoes of cars on the highway. Whispers of nocturnal creatures. A siren in the distance. These words are seemingly writing themselves in my word doc. at 12:05 a.m. But that’s when these thoughts come alive, don't they? It isn’t a novel feeling. Maybe you’ve had it before, maybe it’s bounced around your brain until you reach for the Advil, or maybe someone’s just tried to explain it to you - the melancholy urge to leave your current life and explore a new one.
After four years of high school it was fairly prominent for me, and now at the conclusion of my five year university degree even more so. There’s an odd contrast in this emotion because it’s not for a lack of friendships or opportunities rooting me here, there’s just something romantic about the unknown. Something appealing about not knowing what will happen next.
School coming to an end isn’t the only major change in my life. Over the past few weeks I’ve been giving myself a break from training and slowly coming to terms with not competing for the foreseeable future. The strange part is now that I don’t see my teammates out for runs, or discuss workout times, I’m very okay with it. Now, running feels like a privilege, and I bask in the simple feeling of putting one foot in front of the other along with the dull burn of a four minute kilometer.
It would be really easy to settle into living at home, working, and saving a bit of money, there’s an undeniable comfort in that. My training would benefit as much as my bank account, too. Although routine can be very healthy, I find that I’m not stimulated unless things are changing and challenging. That’s why I’ve decided to embark on a volunteer program in Tanzania. After four years of eye-opening global development studies and a few years of painfully dry poli-sci I’m beyond ready to put theory into practice. From June to September I’ll be in a small town called Babati aiding MVIWATA– a peer to peer farming organization that strives to lift fellow farmers out of poverty.
There are issues around the world that have been pressing for centuries, and some that have only just popped up since the turn of the century. My hope with this placement is to chip away at some of these issues as best I can. Uniterra is the organization that’s facilitating dozens of students and myself to volunteer abroad. Their mission is promoting economic development by empowering women and youth to break out of deeply rooted cultural norms and make their own decisions. How do you achieve that mouthful? Capacity building.
Capacity building is a complex beast of knowledge. Put simply though, it’s an approach used in community development that focuses on people as agents of transformation. It emphasizes using available resources – namely knowledge and relationships– to evoke change, and tap emotion to convey the journey to others. It’s a holistic approach that attempts to integrate each member of a community into a bigger plan, and doing so by fostering cohesion. “Give a woman a fish, she will eat for a day. Teach her how to fish, she will eat for the rest of her life. As long as climate change doesn’t fuck that up.”
The industry of international development sometimes gets a bad rep for being overly intrusive or misplacing resources. And for those reading this thinking ‘these volunteer trips are a waste of time and money’, you’re totally entitled to that position because they can be. I, too, have scrutinized alternative spring break trips from the comfort of my couch. But consider this: just because there’s unequal dispersal of benefits in such situations doesn’t mean there is no benefit at all.
Uniterra understands that these types of programs will benefit the volunteer exponentially more than the organization with which they work. And that’s okay. That mutual understanding of managing expectations is a transferable skill not only to other walks of life, but to those around you. Perspective is priceless, that’s what you gain from an experience abroad, whether it’s for one week or one year.
It’s really exciting to be excited about something other than running . Although I’ve been keeping up on the elliptical and in the gym, running isn’t the number one facet of my life anymore. The anticipation of this work placement and fantasizing about the endless turns afterward have washed over old obsessions of training like water on a chalk covered sidewalk. A fresh start. A new outlook.
Writing in the dead of night reveals unique thoughts – and that’s all these are at the moment, thoughts. I have no idea what will happen in the next three months. I do know that I’ve never felt more ready to dive head first into the unknown.
You’re waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don’t know for sure, and it doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter?
A good friend of mine told me that if you have something to say you should say it, and that’s given me the courage and confidence to post this piece and keep writing. I also have to give credit to the awe-inspiring Christopher Nolan for the unnerving riddle(?) at the beginning and end of this piece. The thumbnail is artwork from Odesza's latest album, a moment apart, a pertinent soundtrack for this thought process.
P.S. I leave for Tanzania in a few days, if you’re interested in hearing about what I’ll be doing or are curious about embarking on a similar adventure please reach out! I know this isn’t a political piece, but it was very necessary considering I’ve been sitting around thinking about the future a lot.