Finding Meaning

Once you return from a trip it is always hard to find time to really think about what just happened. Usually tired from a week of trying to do and experience everything, you sleep on the plane, and sleep for as many hours as you can when you get home. Then as my mom says it is “time to get back into the swing of things.” Work and the day-to-day reappear with a vengeance in the form of full inboxes of unread email and home tasks that were left undone when trip preparation took precedent. So really thinking about what a trip out of the country for something beyond vacation really means in the grand scheme of your life comes in snatches. And sometimes forcing the grand meaning of it all is inauthentic and has the danger of both minimizing and maximizing the meaning at the same time.

So to sum up my trip to Haiti with the Melton Foundation’s Deep Dive, here’s what I know... now:

•  I am glad to have helped in the capacity I did—in something that wasn’t just a show for the volunteer coming to help, but in a way that the organization (Foi et Joie) urgently needed help with.
• While in Haiti, I interacted with far more cultures than I anticipated before going in to the trip which helped to create a week full of different languages and moments where translations through multiple languages happened and succeeded.
•  I have a renewed motivation to be better in the language department.
• Off roading is a championship sport in Haiti.
• Tap-taps are pure genius in my novice business opinion :)
•  If you try, others try. Being helpful and being humble goes a long way and that is beautiful.

The big meaning and/or the big impact on my life—whether I take a right as opposed to a left on my path of life in thefuture—is yet to be made clear but I know experiences build and I am excited to continue to work with Foi et Joie and to see where this all takes me.