People In Passing

World AIDS Orphans Day was Wednesday.

From Scouts.org:

World AIDS Orphans Day will occur on 7 May. More than 25 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents to AIDS – equivalent to the number of people living in New York, Paris, Rome and Bangkok combined. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 12 million children have been orphaned by the pandemic. In addition to being especially vulnerable to all forms of exploitation, these children face financial difficulties, disease, and stigmatisation.

Short Notice: The World Affairs Council of Oregon, the Portland Area Global AIDS Coalition (PAGAC), and Unitarian Universalist Global AIDS Coalition (UUGAC) are hosting Stephen Lewis at the First Unitarian Church of Portland tonight.

Stephen Lewis is the co-director of AIDS-Free World (www.aids-freeworld.org), and was the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa from 2001 – 2006, his extensive career in the fields of diplomacy, politics, activism and humanitarian work includes roles as Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations.

He is a powerful, motivating speaker that you shouldn’t miss.

Full info HERE

Details:

Friday, May 9, 2008
First Unitarian Church of Portland
SW 12th and Main

Stephen Lewis 7:00 p.m.
Action Fair 6:00 p.m. & 8:30 p.m.
$5-15 Admission (sliding scale)

I’ve now been back as long as I was gone.

In those first six months I was a vagabond traveler turning whichever way the wind blew, running my tally of countries visited to 21. Sleeping in cars, trains, busses, and on floors, couches, bunks, and beds. In the six months since I have planted and grown longer roots than I have known in my adult life and couldn’t be happier about it. I have purchased property with my lovely fiancee (we got the house!) And as of last weekend we got a puppy!

Last Saturday started off simply. Summer and I had tickets to the local roller derby. Neither of us had ever been to one before and had been wanting to for some time. I bought our tickets for the Rose City Rollers online and we were set. Picture a bunch of women racing around a track wearing old school roller skates, knee and elbow pads, helmets, tattoos, and a fiendish grin all racing around a track trying to knock each other down. Now that’s entertainment!

Also at the Expo Center was the annual Pet and Companion Faire which we stopped by before the Rollers.

Walking around the many aisles of furry, fluffy, and feathered things we knew we wanted a dog. We sat with a number of dogs and talked to them and their handlers but nothing stuck. Until Carter. Carter was passed out on the floor of the Humane Society of Southwest Washington’s booth. One ear up and one ear floppy you could do whatever you wanted to him. He was spent.

We walked him and talked to the girl that was fostering him for probably an hour and a half. Everyone that walked by said two things: “He’s soo cute!” and “Look at those paws!”

Yep. He’s a horse, or he will be. Shepherd and Lab mix weighing in at 24lbs and only three and a half months old. He is projected to land somewhere in the 60-80lb. range. Needless to say, we never made it to see the Rose City Rollers that night. We did however add a new member to the family.

Internet people, meet Carter Michael Pierce: (Michael for the late Michael Carnahan who was a lover of all dogs and dedicated his Sundays to walking them at the Humane Society)

Life changes quickly, so let’s move on.

The Iraq War turned 5 years old this week.

While driving I heard something on the radio that moved me and brought a different level of reality to the war for me. A soldier named Brian Turner writing a blog for the New York Times considers the last American soldier to die for that war. This is what I heard:

Who can say where that last soldier is now, at this very moment? Kettlemen City. Turlock. Wichita. Fredricksburg. Omaha. Duluth. She may be in the truck idling beside us in traffic as we wait for the light to turn green. He may be ordering a slice of key lime pie at Denny’s, sitting at a booth with his friends after bowling all night. What name waits to be etched on a stone not yet erected in America? Somewhere out in the vast stretches of our country, somewhere out in Whitman’s America, out among the wide expanse of grasses, somewhere here among us the last soldier may lie dreaming in bed before the dawn as the sun sets over Iraq.

As soon as I got home I tracked down the whole piece. You can read it here: “Requiem for the Last American Soldier to Die in Iraq” and I hope that you do.

I decided to cobble together all the posts I wrote while traveling last year into a single page (sorry, multi-page code is broken). The blog always lists the most recent post, so if you weren’t reading along from the beginning it can be pretty difficult to navigate through and find all the pieces-parts of the trip.

Round-The-World : Phase 1 (http://peopleinpassing.com/round-the-world-phase-1/)

I have made no edits to the posts themselves. Cleanup, elaboration, and grammatical fine-tuning still remain goals of mine. Just not today. Also, weighing in at a little over 30,000 words, I have not re-read the collected posts start to finish so I don’t know if it flows or is a herky-jerky narrative experience. Consider yourself warned.

All that said, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed experiencing and writing it.

Oh, and Happy Valentines Day too

I’m breaking the silence!

I’ve been quiet for quite a while.

I’ve been back for over two months and no posts? Yeah, honestly, I wanted to avoid it for a while. That, and I really have been incredibly busy!

I ended up leaving the country again three weeks after I got back. Summer and I flew down to Cabo for a week and, I have to say, it was an incredibly relaxing time! It actually felt like a vacation. All inclusive food and booze, we ate and drank and lay in the sun.

After that trip it was back to work. There was some adjustment to the return to responsibility and actually having to be places at specific times but it happened quickly.

Life sped up immeasurably at that point. It really was interesting to go from a leisurely snails pace to the fuel-injected speed of what is everyday life for Americans. I got to see it happen.

Since then I’ve been re-exploring my many hobbies and developing new ones. Summer and I are buying a house (keep your fingers crossed). Those of you that have been through that know what an educational experience it can be. We should know in the next weeks if we got the one we wanted.

And finally, in a couple weeks, I’m off to Washington D.C. for Super-Tuesday to see how that town deals with the playoffs for this country’s political Super Bowl.

Well that’s the update. I’ve been staring at the blog for a while now thinking “I should write something” so I did. Now… let’s move on…

I actually started writing this three weeks ago, not long after I’d arrived in Istanbul. While I was excited to be in such a diverse and active place I noticed that my sense of awe and enthusiasm were not where they should have been. I found I spent more and more time in the hostel or the nearby restaurant reading or talking to people I’d met. My drive to go walk for six to eight hours a day was gone. I was only six blocks from the Blue Mosque and Hava Sophia and it took me three days before I bothered to go check them out. I was awash in an amazing culture and I was, I can’t say bored, I was tired.

Back at the very beginning of this trip I talked to my friend Candice, who was very excited for my trip and the route I was taking. She had done a year around the world with someone and gave me some sage advice. “From one traveler to another, don’t drink the water, use hand sanitizer a lot, and don’t be afraid to stop if you get tired.”

In Sofia I met a man from Hong Kong named Kerry Pan. Kerry was on an overland journey from Hong Kong to the Middle East. He’d spent the last few years traveling all over the world. South America, Asia, Japan, etc… He would always return home to regroup after a period of time.

In Istanbul I met a German man named Johan (I think I’m spelling that correctly). He had been traveling regularly for 20+ years, all on his motorcycle. He has logged nearly 1,000,000 kilometers and was presently on a journey from Germany to South Africa. We talked about my concerns and lack of enthusiasm and he told me that his limit was six months. He’d taken longer trips but hadn’t enjoyed them as much. He found that after six months for him it just became living. “What pub am I going to hang out in?” “Where am I going to eat?” that kind of thing. The thrill started to wane.

I’d planned the trip, saved enough to get me through a year or more, studied the routes, bought the gear, sold my car, and put my life on hold. It wasn’t until I’d spent months on the road that I realized I might have an upper limit on my attention span for this kind of thing. You can’t know unless you try. No matter what, I know that I tried, and that I’m not done.

I’m glad I had these conversations, and many others, with fellow travelers. When I first started to feel it, I was concerned, and it was nice to have others with a long term trip under their belt let me know they’d felt the same way.

I know there will be some that are disappointed in my decision to stop early. For them, know that it was not an easy decision. I spent several weeks, and countless hours, weighing everything. Was I wasting this opportunity I’d created? Was I stopping too easily? Could I just push past it? In the end I knew that this wasn’t the end, just the end of the beginning. Anyone who thought this trip would “get it out of my system” or “settle me down” doesn’t know me very well. This trip, as long as it lasted, has only opened the door for bigger, more difficult, travel and challenges. So as to not become jaded to future adventures it’s better I stop now and regroup.

Maybe it would be different if I didn’t have my future wife waiting patiently for me at home. She has never pressured me into any decisions about this trip. Still, being away from Summer has been the single most challenging aspect of this whole adventure. Thanks to technology and the availability of the Internet I’ve been able to talk with her often but it’s not the same. I’m sure you can ask anyone posted overseas or in another city about that. There’s also the “Damn, I wish she could see this” factor.

I’ve learned a great deal about myself and the world over the past six months. You can’t not with this kind of experience. You learn what you can and can’t live without, there are more extreme lessons in the world I’m sure, but this has been mine. You learn what is important to you. You learn about the insignificance of so many things you worry about every day. Similar I think to when you age, you realize how to be comfortable in your own skin, and how all that self-conscious crap while you were young, was crap. You realize how everyone is just a person like you. Loves the same, needs the same, lives the same, just differently.

So, with all that said, sorry for the seemingly abrupt end to the adventure. It really isn’t the end. I will spend the rest of my life reaching this goal. I’m more interested in enjoying the ride than unenthusiastically accomplishing a task. Life is too short.

Pacific Northwesterners! I’m back! and unemployed! anybody want to buy me a drink?