How I Fell In Love With Travel

I grew up in a very small city in Colombia. I am from the land of Vallenato, which probably means nothing to you, but a whole lot to me.

I also grew up knowing that someday I would move to Chicago, a city in the United States. My mother would show me pictures of Chicago and would tell me that we were going to move there. I loved my home, but I also dreamed of living in Chicago!

The move finally came. When I was 10 years old, we packed as much as we could into a few suitcases, and we moved across the ocean. I did not know it then, but I had a new title, a new identity. Now, I was an immigrant.

I also did not know that I had just moved to a city of immigrants. When my mother would talk about the U.S, she always said that people were different, and that we would need to learn how to speak English. She never mentioned that I would hear Spanish all the time, that my first teacher would be fluent in my language, or that our neighborhood would be full of people from Eastern Europe and the Middle-east. I started to fall in love with all the different cultures around me. I wanted to see all of the countries that my neighbors came from.

My first night in Chicago!

My chance finally came three years later. When I was 13 years old, I was able to go to Kenya and Tanzania with other kids from the U.S and Canada. We went on a service trip and lived surrounded by the Maasai Mara for three weeks.

At first, we all met up in Toronto. I got to sight see for a day and I was loving every second of it. But that was only the beginning.

During my three week stay in Africa I got to go on safaris, feed/kiss giraffes in Nairobi, learn about the Maasai people and work alongside them, and more! We would see the beauty of the milky way every night, and we had an electric fence around our camp so that the elephants would not trample us or that the lions would not attack us. We got to learn from the people, we took walks to get water from the river just like they did, and we made bricks how they would make them, and their kids played and worked with us. And with every little thing that I did, I fell in love.

I came home from that trip as a different person. I wanted to see more of the world, I wanted to help more people too. I wanted to go back to Africa and see more of it (I still do!), and I wanted to have more experiences like the ones I had there.

I would say that I fell in love with cultures first, and with travel second. But now I love exploring different aspects of both.

This is when/where it all began. And I have not looked back since.