Last month my team sat under a mango tree in Mozambique inputing medical records into an excel spreadsheet. It is amazing what you can learn about a person by simply reading a sheet of paper. Some of the medical conditions were amusing: a woman who has been trying to get pregnant for five years and doesn’t understand why she can’t, even though she had her tubes tied five years ago, or the man who was prescribed more sex to combat his urinary track infection. Yet, most were sad, glimpses into lives wrought with pain and suffering: a man who is fighting AIDS, worms, arthritis and a skin condition all at the same time. The doctor gave him the only thing he could, a one time dose of Ibuprofen. We flipped though numerous pages of malnourished children and a came to a boy with scabies on his feet. The prescription – “shoes” that he couldn’t afford.
The World Race is about growth and suffering, experiencing and embracing a person’s pain as I live life alongside them. It’s about learning to survive on less than 3 USD a day and realizing that communication, clean drinking water, and showers are a luxury I take for granted. But most importantly this journey is about change.
Shortly before my launch in September 2011, the director of The World Race addressed my squad. “There are a lot of young adults who graduate from college wanting to change the world,” he said, “but you can’t change the world until you yourself have been changed.”
I have always had a passion for serving the underprivileged, giving my time at soup kitchens and traveling regularly on service trips to build houses and meet other immediate physical needs. Yet, I eventually came to realize that fulfilling a physical need does not always have a lasting impact and I devoted my life to the saying, “If you give a man a fish, he only eats for a day, but if you teach him how to fish he eats for a lifetime.” However, on The World Race I have seen that the reality is much worse; you can devote your life to teaching men how to fish, but it doesn’t do any good if there is a wall up around the fish pond.
In the past four months, I have witnessed and experienced government corruption, racism, human trafficking, inequality, and abandonment. In China, individuals with special needs are locked away, because society has no place for them and in South Africa, thousands of girls are forced into the sex industry each year by their families. By the year 2050, it is projected that the county of Swaziland won’t exist, because such a high percentage of the population is already infected with AIDS. Systems around the world are failing, and individuals get lost in the mix, forced into poverty and isolation, kept there by systems out of their control. In order for lasting change to occur, the wall around the pond must be knocked down.
The World Race is an adventure. I have been snorkeling in The Philippines, did a handstand on the Great Wall of China, and survived the tallest bungee jump in the world during my time in South Africa. However, I have also looked into the eyes of a South African man dying of AIDS and held the hand of a 90-year-old midwife in The Philippines. I have taken a special needs orphan in China out for ice cream and worked alongside local men in a hot Mozambican field. I have seen hope in all of their eyes. A hope that tomorrow will be different, that tomorrow somebody will step out in faith to change the world, because they first have been changed.
