Holiday

School has been out the last 2 weeks for holiday and genocide memorial week. To be honest it’s kind of weird being in the country while all the memorial and reconciliation stuff is going on. I think the country kind of wants the time to be between Rwandese, which I certainly can’t blame them. So a couple of us decided to swing up to Uganda to check it out and have a little R & R before term 2. It was a quite nice time and I really enjoyed the change of scenery. I also met a lot of interesting folks. Actually that’s what kind of made the trip. I met folks from all over the world. I met people from Germany, England, Finland, Norway, Spain, New Zealand (my favorite type of people I have run into so far), Brazil, Pakistan and India. I thought I had met people from all over the world until I realized I hadn’t run into anyone from the states. This did not happen until the second to last day of the trip when we ran into a sleuth of Peace Corp vols rafting. To be honest it was quite nice to run into people from my own country but kind of weird that I hadn’t run into anyone from the good ole US of A yet.

Then I thought back to this article I had read a couple weeks about by Nick Kristof pretty much saying that the US needs to get out there and see some different parts and meet some different types of people. I think he said that less than 30% of Americans have passports and of that 30% only 2% travel somewhere other than Mexico or Canada.

Some of the folks that I met were on gap year, which is where you take a year off between high school and college and just do something. It seems to be really popular in the UK but not so much in the US. I think Obama has talked about it a little bit and I know my little brother had to write an essay question about it on college applications. Looking back I really wish I did this. Of the people doing gap year that I spoke with, all seemed to really enjoy it and felt like they had grown up a lot doing so. Wish that was me. So what I’m trying to say here is that I am promoting gap year and I am also promoting you to get your passport and go out and see some stuff.