BY JOELLEN COLLINS
Moving away from a great area one has called home for over 40 years is daunting. I expected changes and missing friends, but knew that this was a necessary chapter to complete in the book of my life. I have titled this section as the “last great adventure of my life.”
As a woman who has traveled and resided, even for short times, in Third World countries and striking landscapes, I have developed my own definition of an adventure. For me, climbing mountains and floating in space are not the traditional activities that one often views as adventurous. They are.
My work in progress (my life) has consisted of other kinds of adventure. I was a rather sickly child and didn’t develop the balance, skills, and strength to try scary and dangerous physical challenges. Instead, I created adventures in my mind by reading the rich and lavish books filled with colorful illustrations of foreign lands and stories. We didn’t have TV. I desired to visit these places, especially in the year I spent in my room with severe asthma and broken ribs. My third grade wasn’t spent on a playground; my “fields” were the quilt squares serving as sites of rice paddies, palaces, or Swiss meadows inspired by the books piled next to my bedside.
Since then, I have sought the great adventures I encountered through reading by visiting vastly different and sometimes Third World countries. I may not have packed heavy boots or skis, water-retardant clothes for fording streams, or backpacks filled with outdoor gear. Despite different goals, I admire those who have traveled in wild places of physical challenge.
Instead, my parents encouraged me (even with the widely feared existence of headhunters in the Amazon River Valley) to volunteer with 24 other college students to board prop planes and travel to the Andes to construct playground equipment in rural schools at 11,000 feet, near Uyumbicho, Ecuador. Our mission was to ingratiate ourselves with nine village elementary schools, to be followed by the USA Point Four program bringing medical and dental services to these remote places.
That trip was my first trip abroad and inspired me to volunteer and travel to places like India, China, Thailand and Africa, where I learned that the greatest adventures were in knowing and accepting other peoples and cultures. I tried to speak unfamiliar languages, sleep comfortably on bamboo mats, sample new foods, and accept “foreign” beliefs and behaviors. While being enriched in my world view, I was often lonely and slightly fearful, but never enough to stop using the “wheels on my feet” my mother-in-law accused me of having. Places like Hawaii, Greece, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Italy also beckoned with more luxurious and personal expeditions.
So now, even with rusty wheels, I am embarking on another kind of trip by meeting new peers in California, near my birthplace. I am finding diverse people with fascinating stories and learning to accept my different way of life—not too bad a final adventure I intend to treasure.