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| I imagine travelling to new places will look a bit like this.... |
There are a couple of reasons for this aforementioned longing. There's the landscape (the Inca trail and Machu Picchu are my top tourist wish), language (learning Spanish, another top priority) and of course it's an entire continent I haven't actually travelled to. And the slight pain that everyone I know seems to have recently been in Brazil or Bolivia or Chile. It's a challenge.
Yet beyond the incredible culture, there are people who have only ever lived there. And have never travelled beyond the bounds of the continent that I'm so desperate to go to. And in my selfishness, again, I've forgotten to think about the people who inhabit these seemingly exotic lands.
Of course, I've heard stories. My job can be simplified to storyteller - a wonderful privilege but also a challenging role. It means that so often, I worry more about how a story can be told than what it's really all about.
What do I forget? So often, their emotions, their struggles, what they've been through. I read stories of poverty and devastation on such a regular basis that I've become desensitised. I'm indifferent about injustice, not angry.
In our culture it's hard to be angry at injustice because it's everywhere yet nowhere all at once. We read stories on the news and care for a moment before moving on. We give money to charity then forget why we donated in the first place. And we think of ourselves and our struggles so much more than those of people we've never met.
Why should we care? We don't know them. We've never met them.
Meet Edile:
He lives in South America and his story is real and worth caring about. More than my wanderlust for somewhere new. Worth changing my indifferent attitude for.
It's Christian Aid Week, and Christian Aid want to challenge indifference. Yes, I work for them, but I believe in them. And it's such a privilege to tell stories for a living with the hope that telling them will bring transformation.
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