How Going To Africa Changed My Life

What I learned in Africa and why you should absolutely travel there!

Traveling to Africa is a must-practice experience as it will near definitely give your life a completely new perspective! My dad is French, my mother is Gabonese. Being bi-racial, living in France (4-6 hours away from black Africa) and having many African friends, I always idea I knew what I needed to know already about the continent. My life changing story started when nosotros all had to travel to a cultural event held by my father's company in Cote d'ivoire (West Africa). I was 19 years one-time then and it was the first fourth dimension in my life that I felt this damp oestrus settling on my skin. A 1-calendar week trip ended up becoming a two-year cocky discovering journeying throughout Africa. A journey that changed me for the better and thought me fundamental lessons.

You'll realize that "poverty" is a paradoxical wealth

First contact with people who have and then niggling fabric appurtenances, only then much generosity to offering. Beingness confronted to a different standard of social comfort for the first time is difficult. Today, I'k and so thankful for this eye opening experience that made me realize how spoiled and ungrateful I was and exposed me to a different truth. I take long since cultivated a great need to understand and run across the different realities of the people who live on our planet. In that sense, information technology was this discovery that sowed the seed of generosity in me.

2. You'll grow out of your comfort zone and what you lot're used to

I had never seen so many people gathered in small streets. It was a chaotic spectacle at first. But I fell in love with that sense of community and ended upwards exploring almost the entire continent. I have met people who accept incredible wisdom. I thanked life for having met such donating people, and so I wondered if, in Paris, a family of strangers would accept offered me a bed in their firm like then many did in Africa, with so picayune hesitation. This trip made me realize that the construction imposed by our Western society is but an imaginary one, that social conventions are borders created by humans, that there are many ways of looking at life, love, respect, dissimilar ways of reading a volume, left to correct or right to left. In short, different ways of navigating the world.

3. You'll become more than aware of moments of life

I discovered the fiddling and elementary pleasures in life, like blowing bubbles when washing easily and playing soccer with former milk cans. I emptied my pockets, but I filled my centre. Full of pity, I oscillated between empathy and sympathy. Existence aware of these things all of a sudden made me responsible. I went from a spoiled immature woman who thought she deserved everything from the world to a more humble person who recognizes her place in the universe. Once nosotros know certain things, our whole life is turned upside downward, it is fifty-fifty the whole meaning of life that changes.

four. You'll crave more of similar experiences

The render to France was difficult, but I didn't stay for long and I speedily left for a three month trip to Madagascar. I wanted (or needed) more of the colorful houses, line-fishing villages, and unique cultures. I signed upwards for a volunteer internship with a local non-profit and I taught french to the locals. Every forenoon I walked to the main road to the school and those are some of my best memories.

5. Yous'll go a better person!

Regardless of your destination in Africa, one affair I can assure yous is that a trip in that location, will definitely change you for the better. It was subsequently discovering Africa that I began to brand sense of this quest, a meaning to my life. I needed to run into more than of that world and know its suffering in gild to find my place in our society which is and then upright and sometimes a little too individualistic for my gustatory modality. I needed to hear people's stories, to see realities different from mines, to choose what kind of job I wanted to do in France.

When I call up back to my journey through Africa, I am instantly happy with all that my eyes accept seen, with all that I have learned in those 2+ years , and I am even more eager to travel. I desire to go to bed every day having learned something new and being a better person. I am even more convinced that cognition enables action and learning more than nigh other people is what nosotros'll save humanity.