“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
– Anaïs Nin
We do it for you. The reader. The individual sitting at home who is even mildly curious about where this journey has taken us, and the experiences that have transformed us. We type these words in internet cafes and parks and wherever else we can find a moment of connection so that you can see what we see. We want to share everything with you, our friends, our family, our invisible audience because we are erupting with thoughts and feelings that we can’t always understand ourselves. We want you to live vicariously through us! To glimpse our exploits and maybe glean some information that we overlooked or are too emotionally invested in to really comprehend. We want this year to have been interactive. We want you to laugh, cry, grimace, or shout. We want you to take advantage of new opportunities that you may otherwise have ignored. In short, we want you to go out and LIVE. We want you to have experiences of your own so that when we return, we can swap tales and share snippets of who we are now. We want to know that the world has not stopped turning in our absence.
We do it for us. The Fellows. The people out “in the field” whether we be in Brazil, Senegal, or on the other side of Ecuador. We want to know what others are up to and how their experiences compare to ours. We want to be a little jealous of those of us in the Amazon region who are swimming in rivers and using machetes. We want to see images of exploding volcanoes and beautiful beaches and colors and cultures. But more than that we want to see how our friends are living in these environments and we want to share in their struggles and successes. We want to remain connected no matter how far away we may be.
We do it for ourselves. For me. So that I can track my progress and see the changes that have occurred in my personality. I like to revisit blogs from the summer before all of this. To catch a glimpse of who I was and to smile at the naïve girl who was just itching for an adventure. I want to be able to look at these in a few years and slip back into Bayushig with my family. I want to relive all of my highlights (learning Spanish, climbing mountains, playing soccer) as well as my challenges (finding dead mouse fetuses on my bed, getting locked in my room for a day, being thrown up on at work). I write these words because this is how I feel at this moment right now and I want to make this permanent. I want to capture a piece of my soul and store it carefully away like a Polaroid in a shoe box forgotten after so many years. I blog because it’s over now and memories fade so quickly. We blog to remember. We blog because we did this amazing thing and we want nothing more than to perpetuate it.
