I am putting together a show of my travel work from Uganda, Rwanda, Costa Rica, and India which will be displayed in the Wesleyan Church Headquarters in Indianapolis, IN. While making the placecards I had to look through my journals to find names and locations. While reading through my Journal from Uganda and Rwanda, I found this entry:

9/3/06 Kibungu, Rwanda, East Africa
"Today was a day just like any other day except for the manioc (banana mush) for breakfast. Today was a day just like any other except for falling asleep in a rickety bus on the way to a rural Anglican parish in south eastern Rwanda. The same sun I have know all my life greeted me over the most beautiful red-sand mountain with lush vegetation. It is strange knowing I am below the equator, I am on a new and different continent, but feeling I am the same person. It is strange because I could wake up tomorrow in Indiana, the next day in India and still I would feel the same. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe this is good; I am prepared to travel the world."

I find it interesting that I wrote this two and half years ago, but still when I travel I feel the same way: a disappointment that I am not different while my environment is different. I don't know if I just built up traveling in my mind so much that I have outlandish expectations for the transformational effects of travel. I can even remember feeling this way traveling with my family as a boy, somehow expecting the distance traveled to magically transform everything about my ability to sense my environment.