Why travel to Nicaragua?

The ability of technology to bridge distance and connect us with colleagues, friends and partners across the world has advanced radically in the past decade. Given the availability of low cost opportunities to engage technology to bridge distance why do we need to travel? Learning, dialog and sharing can happen online quite readily (for some) and travel can be difficult, expensive and unpleasant.

The qualification (for some) is one reason. Ready access to technology is not ubiquitous and even where and when it the tech is available; it may not be affordable or reliable. Tangibility is perhaps an even larger reason. Even with full on broadband available 24/7 and all the gear needed to videoconference the tangibility of the experience is thinner. Standing face to face, sheltering under an awning, as the rain pours down in cascades and mountains recede into afternoon mists is a powerful experience that cannot be simulated. This closeness and presence of another opens spaces that otherwise would not exist.

I don’t mean to make is sound mystical, because it is not. It is the practical, lived experience. This act of sharing space and moving through the world together, crossing a field to look at this particular plant or sitting together sharing a meal, creates possibilities for communion that do not exist otherwise. And, speaking from personal experience, these moments transcend language barriers. You may not be fluent in Spanish but by sharing in the everyday lived experience of a farmer in Nicaragua a different path to understanding opens.

Bonds are created more readily, connections built, which can then withstand the uncertainties of technology as a way of keeping the connection alive, once bread has been broken together. The technology always works better, as a connector, once you’ve shared in person

There is also the part that is a dislocation. It is all too easy for us to sit here, comfortable and comforted by our technology and knowledge, and without knowing or awareness flex the privilege we all carry with us as comfortable North Americans. The best intended of us, the most aware, can still slip into “expertizing” without knowing. But, being taken out of the comfortable context of daily life, the regularities and routines, and placed in a “foreign” situation can dislocate all of that expertise and shift you into new perspectives and relationships.

Travel is not easy but it’s not too hard. And it can change you in ways that a videoconference never could.