Take FLYTE: Notes on the power of travel.

“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”

—Mary Anne Radmacher

It’s a Saturday afternoon in Santo Domingo—capital city of the Dominican Republic—and I’ve just arrived with a group of fellow students from my high school.

We set out straight for the beach, sopping up rice and beans with fried corn bread, spotting palm trees and baseball fields, and speaking Spanish for the first time outside our classroom walls. It is the first time my feet have stood on foreign soil; the first time my eyes have watched the sun sink below a new horizon. I am sixteen years old.

That night in my journal I write: I immediately fell in love with it, with the newness and excitement of a different culture.

Ever since a family vacation to California, where I walked through John Muir Woods and begged my parents to let me go off the trail, I had been desperate to take a different path in life—in both a literal and figurative sense. I wanted to explore new territory in the world, and inside myself; I wanted to explore a different way of doing things.

The Dominican offers me my first real glimpse of that difference.

* * *

A few weeks ago—on the morning of my 29th birthday, in fact—a message arrived from my mom. While cleaning out her office, she’d stumbled across one of my college application essays and thought I would enjoy a look at it. At the top of the essay, I’d written out the prompt: Travel or living experiences in other countries.

Suddenly I could remember coming across that prompt in the long list the college sent out and saying to myself, now *this* I can write about.

As I went about my birthday in the Bay Area—hanging out with dear friends, squeezing in phone calls with family as I crisscrossed the city on the BART—my mind kept returning to that trip to the Dominican Republic and the impact it had on me.

The next day, I left San Francisco for Central America. As you might’ve read in my latest post, I’m currently holed up in a little casita on the beautiful shores of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. During my first week here, another message arrived in my inbox—this time from my friend Matt Kepnes (whom you might be more familiar with as Nomadic Matt, author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day).

Matt was writing to let me know about a non-profit he would soon be starting—the Foundation for Learning and Youth Travel Education (FLYTE, for short)—with the express purpose of helping high school students from underserved communities in the US get out into the world to travel and expand their worldview. At the end, Matt asked if I would like to help spread the news about FLYTE, which launches today.

Again, my mind immediately jumped to the essay my mom had sent through on my birthday—absolutely, I replied to Matt. Because sometimes the universe hands you posts that are just meant to be written…

* * *

During the week that followed after we arrived in Santo Domingo, our group volunteered at an orphanage in the mountains, painting walls when we weren’t playing hacky-sack with the kids and carrying them around on our shoulders and backs.

There was one girl in particular who won my heart—Aridaña, with liquid brown eyes and a little gold hoop through each ear. She laughed at my Spanish but talked with me anyways, telling me about her brothers and sisters and about her school down the street.

We played hand games like Miss Mary Mack and I gave her a box of chiclets, but only after she promised not to tell her friends.

Esta nuestra secreta, ok?

But it was a moment in between the adrenaline rush of our arrival and the week spent with new friends that would remain with me the most, long after our trip ended and we’d returned home.

It was a moment that lasted five hours, a bus ride from Santo Domingo.

* * *

We are on the road to Constanza, weaving and wending our way up hills to a little town near the center of the country. I let the name of our destination roll off my tongue, lingering on the ah of Constahnza. It sits at 4,000 feet above sea level, near the highest point in the Caribbean, and I can feel every second of our ascension, the climbing of an under-equipped, over-loaded vehicle up mountains in the middle of an island.

In the last hour of our journey I manage to snag a window seat. I slide the glass as far forward as possible, press my face against the metal frame of the window and curl my long legs into themselves. The skin of my thighs sticks to the seat.

I have my camera on my lap, an ultra-basic Canon Rebel SLR that I bought three years earlier with babysitting money. I’ve loaded it with a brand-new roll of film—one of only five rolls I’ve brought with me for the trip. My right index finger is poised on the shutter button in eager anticipation.

I shoot the whole roll of film from that window seat, essentially using a fifth of my supply for the trip in a matter of minutes. They are the worst photos I will take all week. Many are woefully underexposed, out of focus, or just poorly composed—half of a teal house with a tin roof. A blur of banana trees. Worn-down wooden fences lining fields of crops I can’t identify.

Still, they are the photos I will treasure most upon my return to the US.

I treasure them the most, because it was the very act of taking those pictures that justified such a remarkable waste of film; for once, the means justified the end.

It was the combination of movement, of my first taste of international travel, and of seeing the world through my own eyes and that of my camera—both apertures on their widest settings—that cleared my head like a window thrown open in a musty room.

Again I turned to my journal that night and wrote:

I felt like a sponge tasting water for the first time. Everything meant so much to me. I’ve realized how much I enjoy it—traveling to a different country, immersing myself in a new culture, remembering the trip through written word and photograph…

I returned to the Dominican the following year and for a second time, was inexplicably moved by what I referred to in that trip’s journal as the ‘infamous five-hour bus ride to Constanza.’ I had snagged another window seat, shot yet another roll of film, and was once again filled with a rare clarity of place and purpose; that I was where I was meant to be, doing what I was meant to be doing.

On each trip something inside me had been irrevocably awakened.

* * *

It’s because of that first trip in high school to the Dominican Republic that I now believe so strongly in the power of travel.

And it’s why, when I initially read about the foundation that Matt is starting, its vision truly resonated with me. With a focus on rural and economically challenged communities in the US, FLYTE’s aim is to cultivate more global citizens—helping teachers give cultural context for what they’re already teaching and providing funding for group trips, including full scholarships for low-income students.

“Opening yourself up to new experiences can have a powerful impact on you and help you figure out who you are and what you want to be,” Matt writes in sharing a bit about what led him to found FLYTE.

“I want this program to take kids out of their comfort zone, open their minds, and inspire them to think big…I want to expose students to a variety of ideas and cultures to show them the possibilities in the world and maybe inspire them to do or be something they never would have considered before.”

I’m excited to support FLYTE today, and hope you might consider doing the same (especially as there are some sweet incentives involved). You can read more about FLYTE here, and if you’d like to contribute to its kick-off campaign, you can do so on Crowdrise.

I will always believe in the way travel gives us greater awareness of the wider world we’re a part of. We learn how families in India, or Morocco, or Guatemala start their days. We stay with a family in rural Ecuador and gain more respect for them in a second of trying to carry the bundle of firewood they’ve just gathered on our back than in a year of learning about them from afar.

I believe in the sense of aliveness we discover when we travel for the first time. The origin of the word alive literally means to be “in life,” and I would argue there is no better way to experience what it means to be in life than to travel. But one of travel’s greatest gifts is that we can then bring this feeling of aliveness home and channel it into other parts of our life: in relationships, in vocations, in our passions and professions.

Finally, I will always believe in the power of travel to point us down the paths we’re meant to pursue. Having spent the last seven years traveling and living abroad since my college graduation, I often think about my 16-year-old self, sitting in that window seat on the road to Constanza, falling in love with the feeling of documenting the world.

She could hardly have known that she would get to document the world for a living one day, and that her 29th birthday would even find her traveling to her 50th country.

And when she wrote the following paragraph to begin her college application essay…

Her name was Aridaña. Eleven years of age with liquid brown eyes that pierced my soul and a laugh that stole my heart. I didn’t know her background, her favorite color, or her favorite type of music, but as we sat side by side in the sultry air of a small Dominican church, we connected.

…she especially couldn’t have known that such connections would come to define the stories she most loves to tell.

But then again, that’s the power of travel, isn’t it?

The world plants seeds, and in time, life brings them to fruition.

* * *

When and where did you take your own first trip outside your home country? I’d love to hear about it, especially the impact it might’ve had on you, so feel free to comment below!