The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept?

I grew up in a family that loved the idea of traveling, but not getting there. My dad, a navy man, loved to travel by water but hated airplanes. My mother was terrified of water, and loved to fly.

We drove a lot.

But that limits where you can go.

I always told myself that I’d rise above my parents’ constraints, that I’d see the world. And honestly, for me, ‘the world’ wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t include somehow going to Africa and ‘making a difference’ (I am well aware of the diversity contained in that one small word, but in my childhood, it mostly meant the Serengeti.)

I started taking steps that way: In 1989, I travelled solo to the UK and took one of those Contiki “ABC” bus tours (our guide told us that ABC meant Another Bloody Castle). It was fun, but controlled. When it was over, I did a side trip to Belgium and Luxembourg and learned how to make and survive my own mistakes.

And then I just stopped.

I lost the vision, the goal. I became an anxious cog in what really was a disposable economy, always trying to be relevant but not finding my path.

Eventually, I started to feel the pull of that unfulfilled promise. And in 2002, a couple of factors came together: means and opportunity. I had a job that paid enough for me to save, and a boss who let me roll vacation days into the next year.

I took three weeks and went to Australia. Not just the southern continent, but also New Zealand and Fiji. It was beautiful, amazing and (except for some sketchy people in Fiji) safe.

As I said, my job gave me means and opportunity, but it didn’t give me motivation.

My dad did that. He became terminally ill. The last conversation I had with him, he challenged me to live the dream, to keep the promise I’d given myself when I was younger; to find a path to go to Africa and make a difference.

I decided that my way to Africa was as a teacher.

It took two years to get everything sorted. And longer to get there. I was facing two big hurdles: I’d never taught, and I’d never lived in another culture.

So I took it in steps: First I spent a summer as an ESL teacher at a summer camp in Toronto. Then I taught ESL in Korea – a different but mostly equivalent culture. Then, and only then, did I go to Africa: Namibia, exactly, an arid country far from the Serengeti.

I taught in a secondary school for two school years. I helped raise the school’s standards, revitalized its library and helped build a new computer lab. I’d made a difference.

And I got to travel. I went to Kruger National Park in South Africa. I took a safari from Nairobi to Dar es Salam, via the Serengeti and Kilimanjaro. I went to Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe/Zambia border.

After my two years in Namibia, I stayed in Africa.

I took a job with an educational charity in Johannesburg, helping students from across the continent improve their lives and the lives of others. I didn’t travel as much, but I did spend a week in a UNHCR settlement in Uganda, filming one of our students. Again, I’d made a difference.

After almost five years in the continent, I was one tired nomad, proud of what I’d done, surprised that I’d been able to do it. My younger self told me I could, and I did.

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I want to add that my parents did eventually take three trips to the UK, flying all the way, and on the last trip, mom and dad took a ferry to Calais, France so that dad could see the white cliffs of Dover as they’re meant to be seen, from the channel.