i won’t stop travelling

Baghdad. Syria. Paris. Istanbul. Dhaka. Brussels. Ouagadougou. Cameroon. Lahore.

These are only some of the places where unspeakable acts of terrorism have taken place over the last few months.

Go back just two years and you can add Sydney. Quetta Airbase. Kano. Baghdad. Jalalabad. Egypt. Kabul.

And so many more.

Sadly, the Western world is conditioned to only sympathise with others like us. #PrayForParis. #PrayForOrlando. Where is #PrayForBaghdad? #PrayForKabul? #PrayForIstanbul yields around 220,000 Instagram results. #PrayForParis gets somewhere in the neighbourhood of 4.9 million. I don’t hear of the almost daily attacks in Kabul or small towns in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran. Two days before the Brussels attack, ISIL killed 24 in Anbar, Iraq. Three days after Brussels, two separate attacks in Aden and Iskandariya killed a total of 56 people. None of these ever made it to my newsfeed. But have you ever googled the list of terror attacks?

And within the few days after each Western attack, my Facebook newsfeed blows up with people asking “so, I have this trip to ___ booked. Should I cancel? I’m just worried.”

Stop it.

Just, stop.

You are more likely to get into a car crash within five miles of your own house than you are to be in a plane crash or a terrorist attack. You are more likely to die from a television falling on you than you are to die from a terror attack.

Worrying, as I’ve been told, is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do but it doesn’t get you anywhere.

Everyone always says, “if we stop doing __, the terrorists win.”

Everyone says, “we can’t let fear cripple us.”

YES, it is scary. I completely agree. I flew across the Pacific Ocean just weeks after several plane disappearances & crashes made international news. I was freaking terrified. Every bump of turbulence jolted me awake and convinced me that *this* was the trip I died on. I didn’t get a wink of sleep and was beyond exhausted after arriving in Wellington.

You know what? As a female, there are far scarier things to deal with while travelling.

I have to be cautious of the people who talk to me at bars. I have to watch where I walk, how I dress. In cities, I have to be careful of traffic. In remote places, of other people. I am more likely to be raped while travelling than I am to be a victim of a terrorist attack.

BUT I won’t stop travelling. I will still go to new places, I will still explore different cultures, different countries. Meet new people – people who are just like me: human. People who see the same news, read the same stories. We will have something in common… sympathy for the rest of them. We will share our stories, our cultures, with each other and learn about a new place together.

You know where I really want to go? Africa. The Congo, specifically. Then Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia. South Africa. Everywhere.

And I want to go to the Middle East. I’ve read so many books about travellers traversing the Silk Road. I want to be there.

I also want to visit India and Southeast Asia. All places where a tall(ish) white American girl travelling alone sticks out like a sore thumb.

I’m not fearless.

I’m a girl who’s going to go places because we can’t put our own lives on hold until this dies down. It’s not going to die down. We are in the middle of a war and its being fought vastly differently than either of the world wars before it. There is incredible amounts of movement of people between nations. There is the internet, new technology, smart phones that allow you to see someone on the other side of the world at the touch of a button.

For better or for worse, this is our world and I’m going to live in it.

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