Wednesday 11/3/10  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I’m writing this post from a coffee shop that’s two blocks from my apartment.  I’m living in West Philadelphia now with my girlfriend.  In the last two months, my contract finished with Invisible Children in Uganda, I moved back to the US (and was awed by the fall foliage—check out the pics), and I started writing a manuscript for a book about the bicycle trip.

For the next five months, I’ll work on the manuscript full-time, adding to and editing the writing I created throughout my ride.  I have a Word document with about 300 pages of trip writing in it.  I’m excited to have the chance to go through this writing and strengthen it.  Often while writing during the trip, I found myself racing a dying computer battery or exhaustion at night in my tent.  The content I put on the site was quickly created and posted before I had much of a chance to edit it.  I’m hoping the finished manuscript will be a more accurate and polished representation of what I experienced on the trip than the writing on this site was.

So, three years after I set off from a New Jersey suburb by bike, I’m both sad and proud to end this chapter of my life.  The trip didn’t follow the exact route I thought it would, but that’s completely fine by me:  it pushed me, allowed me to listen, and helped—at least for a few years—to satiate my curiosity.  It was a physical test, of course, but it was more challenging mentally and emotionally than I expected it to be.  More nights than I revealed on this site I spent lonely and restless in my tent.  I sobbed or collapsed, filled with self-doubt, on more than one occasion.  I entertained dark thoughts on desolate stretches of road; I fought to quiet an ever racing mind.  But the trip exposed a new world to me, one filled with good people and sacred scenery.  It unmasked the “news” we receive from mass media for the nonsense I now know it to be.  It taught me how to better control my thinking, to be a more conscious person.  Perhaps more than anything else, though, the trip taught me that the world is still big, that people aren’t out to get us, and that we all want the same things in life:  love, health, security, knowledge, opportunity.

Because the world isn’t a scary place, and because human-powered traveling is just so damn rewarding, I’m convinced this trip won’t be my last.

To those of you who encouraged me along the way with your comments, emails, and kindness:  I’ll never be able to fully explain how much those small acts meant to me. Thank you.

More to come as life unfolds,

Andrew

Above:  Students wait for class to start in a classroom in Layibi College

**Below is a piece I just wrote for work.  It appears on the IC blog.**

Riddled with holes like some sort of structural Swiss cheese, the ceiling in one of Layibi College’s older classrooms stretched out over us, offering those below glimpses of the building’s innards above.  The physics students—all sixty of them—didn’t seem to notice:  their eyes were focused on the teacher before them.  With chalk in hand, Melody Russell, 33, moved back and forth in front of the chalkboard.  As she wallpapered the board with equations, the students scribbled away in their notebooks.  Each question she asked was met with a field of raised hands.  For ninety minutes, students gave her their undivided attention.  No one passed notes; no one whispered to his neighbor; no one did anything but think, write, and answer questions.  Amazing as this sort of sustained, class-wide focus sounds, it’s par for the course among students working with Invisible Children’s Teacher Exchange teachers.

Above:  Physics students in Melody’s class

This past summer, 45 visiting teachers from the U.S. and Canada team-taught for six weeks with their Ugandan counterparts.  Working for free and paying for their flights and expenses themselves, the visiting teachers sacrificed large chunks of time and money to help students at all of IC’s eleven Ugandan partner schools.  Class after class, students enjoyed the charged, high-energy  classroom atmospheres that team teaching creates.  Students, however, aren’t the only ones who benefit from the summer teacher exchange.  Like the kids they instruct, teachers, too, draw inspiration from the experience and head home with added arrows in their academic quivers.

*****

Melody has been teaching for 10 years.  In that time, she’s walked thousands of students—in both public and private schools—through lab experiments and countless chemistry equations.  I wasn’t surprised when she told me she didn’t have a single major struggle during her six weeks of team teaching this past summer—she’s a pro.  What I was surprised to hear, however, was how her partner teacher, a Ugandan named Robert, was able to command a class of 105 students with little more than raw charisma.  Robert, she explained, supplemented his lecture-heavy, resource-light classes with smiles and jokes—things that, thankfully, are far cheaper and easier to issue to students than textbooks.  “Even with so many students, he’s able to create warmth in his class,” Melody explained.

Because most students in Uganda don’t have their own textbooks, teachers spend large portions of class time copying information from a textbook to the chalkboard.  (“Here, with so few textbooks, dictating is what needs to happen,” said Melody.)  Robert knows this style of teaching isn’t ideal.  For what he lacks in lesson diversity, he compensates for by making himself available to students outside of class hours.  Homework is easier when you know your teacher wants and is available to help you.

I asked Melody about the lessons she’ll take with her back to the states once her time in Uganda comes to a close.  She told me about how the experience has raised her confidence level and shown her that she’s capable of teaching high-level physics.  (In Uganda, she’s teaching high school students who are studying at university level—something she’d never done before.)  She told me about how amazing it’s been to talk over her lesson plans with Robert, to get advice from a peer on a regular basis.  Perhaps most powerful, however, has been the perspective she’s gained from her students.

Above:  Melody doing her thing

“I’m teaching kids in Uganda whose hopes of going to university are lofty dreams,” said Melody.  “I can’t wait to tell my students back home about the kids here; about how students work so hard to do well in school; about how they don’t take their education for granted.  Who knows what my American students will do with this type of news?”

*****

Okello Alfredo is a jovial, bespectacled Ugandan man with an easy smile.  As a first-time partner teacher with the Teacher Exchange Program, he didn’t know what to expect of his American counterpart, Brit, before they started teaching together.  With less than a week left of his team teaching partnership, and with weeks of classes behind him, he didn’t hesitate before answering my question about the program’s strengths.

“I think the program is a productive one,” Alfredo said.  “Both partners gain from each other.  I know that I have learned from Brit in areas of methodology and content.  And I see now how important it is to have child-centered classes, especially in my subject, literature.”

Above:  Brit and Raysa pose with their teaching partners and friends

Just as the bi-directional flow of ideas between partner teachers is one of the cornerstones of the Teacher Exchange Program’s success, Alfredo thinks the program could improve by allowing Ugandan teachers to visit the United States for similar team teaching experiences.  He explained how valuable it would be for Ugandans to experience North American classrooms.  Laughing, he dropped a Ugandan proverb that explained how one’s position determines one’s perspective, “If you only eat from your mother’s pot, you will never believe other mothers can cook.”

*****

Waiting for their physics class to start, Cesar, Geoffrey, and Felix sat in class with their shoulders slumped, exhausted from their gym class the period before.  I asked them what they thought of Melody’s teaching style.

Cesar, 18, answered, “She’s good.  She gives us lots of demonstrations that make it easy to understand things.”

The other boys nodded their heads in agreement.

Felix, 17, added, “And she doesn’t miss lessons.  She’s punctual.”

In Uganda, schools struggle with teacher absenteeism and tardiness.  Many teachers make barely enough money to survive and, hence, work jobs at other schools; sometimes they skip one class so they can go and teach another.  Although senior students often lead study groups for their classmates when teachers are absent, chronic absenteeism retards a class’ academic progress.  Six weeks of punctuality and consistent teacher attendance is, for many students, a breath of fresh air.

Alredo, too, noticed how his students enjoyed the change in atmosphere that his foreign team teacher inspired.  “Their attitudes are more positive.  They’re excited to have classes with her.  You can see that they’re eager,” he remarked.

This eagerness, when sustained by good teaching practices, can push a student to new academic heights.  The Teacher Exchange Program aims to cultivate this student eagerness by energizing both foreign and Ugandan teachers.  The echoes of this summer’s teaching partnerships—new warm-up activities, focused review games, creative content demonstrations, and smiles, among others—will ring out in classrooms on both sides of the Atlantic for the next academic year.  These reverberations are what the program strives to orchestrate.

*****

Patrick, the articulate yet soft-spoken Program Manager of Schools for Schools, sat down with me recently to talk about developing facets of the Teacher Exchange Program.  In late December, six Ugandan teachers—chosen from an applicant pool of 22 candidates—will fly to the U.S.  For one month, they’ll team teach with American teachers, swapping teaching strategies while also absorbing the energy of their host schools.  After a four-day orientation in New York City, the Ugandan teachers will move into teacher-hosted homestay arrangements and begin teaching.  Although it’s being run as a pilot project, the Ugandans-to-U.S. component of the Teacher Exchange Program is primed for success, thanks in part to the folks who are organizing it.

In explaining the purpose of the December trip, Patrick looked me square in the eyes and said, “I believe in the power of exposure.  There is nothing that educates like traveling.”  He said this with such conviction that it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.  Patrick believes in this program.  It’s obvious.  When this type of support for the Teacher Exchange Program permeates IC senior management, and when the teachers themselves commit to investing in their skill sets and students, transformation is inevitable.

Above:  Sunday during a recent visit to IC’s offices in Gulu, Uganda

**The following is a piece I just wrote for work.  This is an example of the type of writing I’m doing most often for Invisible Children–interview-based articles about beneficiaries for use in organization publications/websites.  Check out Invisible Children’s blog (www.invisiblechildren.com/blog) to see this post and others like it**

Sunday
St. Michael’s High School
17 years old

When he sat down across from me, I faced a shy boy with darting eyes. Within moments, though, Sunday came alive in a flurry of smiles and hand gestures. We spent 30 minutes talking about school, about the future, about life. At the start of our interview, I asked Sunday how things had been going, and, waxing poetic like someone twice his age, he replied without hesitation. “You know, in life everything has two sides, like a coin. The good also has the bad. For me, it is the same–two sides. But for now, most things are good.”

Sunday, the central figure in IC’s black bracelet video (titled Sunday: The Story of a Displaced Child), is studying at St. Michael’s High School in southern Uganda. With just over a year under his belt at the new school, Sunday finally feels like he’s settled into the school’s rigorous academic schedule. A typical day for Sunday looks something like this:

5:00 am—Wake up, eat breakfast
6:30 am—Start studying for the day ahead
8:00 am—Lessons start
11:30 am—Lunch
12:30 pm—Lessons resume
4:40 pm—Classes end, brief break for supper and rest
6:00 pm—Evening study sessions begin
11:30 pm—Return to the dorm to crawl into bed

After I listened to Sunday’s schedule, I jotted down some numbers in the margin of my notebook:  7.5 hours of independent study per day, 7.5 hours of class time per day. By any standards–national or international–Sunday is devoting an incredible portion of each day to thought, to bettering himself. I asked him if he had difficulty shifting into such a study-heavy routine.

“At first, I couldn’t keep up easily,” Sunday explained. “There were so many study preps.  I slept a little each night, and I was tired all the time. But I got an alarm clock and started using a time table. Now I use a time table everyday to organize things.  I never  needed to use one before.”

As time passed, Sunday acclimated to his new school. And slowly, students he might have never met had he not been studying at a reputable school–students from Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, and other tribes within Uganda–befriended him. Learning about the customs of his peers has fascinated Sunday. The bouts of stress and sleeplessness that once plagued him now surface only before term exams, just as they do for students everywhere. Seeing Sunday so animated while talking about school, so excited to share his world with me because it was brimming with positivity, with hope, I couldn’t resist asking him about the flip side of his life’s coin.

“And the struggles? Before you said everything has two sides,” I reminded him. “What’s the other side to all of this?”

His face slackened and he looked down at his feet to mull over an answer. After a moment, he spoke. “I still struggle. When I’m at home, during term breaks from school, I have a lot of things to do. I need to dig with my uncle to help him prepare his fields. It’s difficult work. Look,” he said. “Look at my hands, these are the signs of digging.” He held out two calloused palms for me to see, each crowned with an arc of thin, white blisters.

Like many children here, Sunday helps his family members earn the money they need to survive. The practice is so prevalent in Uganda that school breaks are aligned with the start of the planting season, so children can help their parents in the fields. Whereas his American or Australian counterparts would see summer break as a time to relax and recover from the stresses of the school year, Sunday’s ‘breaks’ from school aren’t really breaks at all; when one form of work ends, another begins.

Despite his blisters, despite his 15-hour-a-day study regiment, Sunday is filled with optimism. When I asked him about his future, his face lit up. “My future is going to be bright! You know, at first my dream was to get into a good school. Now I’m there. I’m in the place I dreamed about. So now I’m aiming at another dream: I want to be a doctor. I know that being a doctor is not easy, but I think I can do it.”

I think he can do it, too. For someone like Sunday, someone who is aware of his ability to overcome adversity, becoming a doctor is simply the next step on a path that he’s already walking.

Walk on, Sunday!

Above:  Main road near my house

Friday 4/3/09  Gulu, Uganda

A boda driver makes eye contact with me when I reach the main road.  He looks for a nod or a wave–anything that says I need a ride.  I give him a sign.  He reaches me before the others do, pulling a quick U-turn into oncoming traffic, swerving around cyclists and other boda drivers.  He asks me where I’m headed.  I tell him and jump on the back of his seat.  We pull away from my street on his beat-up motorcycle and slip into the streams of commuters whizzing down the red dusty road in the morning chill.

On my way to work, I pass vendors downtown.  They hunch over and sweep the pavement in front of their storefronts with short, wicker brooms.  Clouds of orange dust peel away from them and drift down into the gutters.  Dust blows in each night to blanket the verandas, but each morning it rises with the jabs of a broom.

On my way to work, I pass colorful lines of students in bright uniforms walking to school.  Boys and girls alike have shaved heads.  Some wear shoes or sandals; others walk barefoot with hardened feet.  The younger kids seem shocked to see me, to see white skin.  They scream out “White person!” or “Foreigner!” in Acholi, a dialect of Luo.

On my way to work, I pass the market.  Sellers set up their stalls, arranging a myriad of functional things–used shoes, boxes of toothpaste and soap, old radios and electric cords, nails and bolts, and plastic chairs.  Each morning the vacant stalls fill with goods; each night they empty.

On my way to work, I pass cyclists of every variety.  One man rides with a cavernous wooden box lashed to a rack above his back wheel.  The box is filled to the brim with different types of animal legs–cow, goat, lamb.  The meat is red and sinewy, bright against the white of the box.  Another man stops at the market with a few dozen live chickens tied to his bike.  In pairs and with their feet bound, the birds hang upside down from his handlebars and watch the pavement zoom by below them.  I pass fathers cycling their children to school, bicycle taxis taking people to work, and soda delivery men clinking along over the bumpy dirt road with a crate of soda bottles.

On my way to work, I pass the bicycle repair shops that keep the cyclists moving.  Squatting in a puddle of scattered tools, repairmen with ever-greasy hands replace spokes and fix flats by the roadside.

On my way to work, I pass mothers.  Some have babies tied to their backs, a small pair of child’s legs straddling their waists.  Some, on their way to the water pump, carry yellow water cans in their hands.  Others balance a basket of clothes or a tray of bananas on their heads.

On my way to work, I pass the reed hut that houses a small generator.  Inside, people pay an old man with stringy arms 500 shillings [$0.25 US] to charge their cell phones.

On my way to work, I pass hordes of bats hanging high up in the tall trees that line the road.  The bats squawk and cry, answering the whines and groans that the old motorbikes make as they dart about on the street below.

On my way to work, I pass smoking stacks of mud bricks, some three or four meters tall.  Next to the stacks, invariably, are pits in the ground–holes where the brick makers gathered their mud.  Long logs, fuel for the fires, are fed into ovens at the bases of the stacks.  Smoke floats above the stacks like wispy gray hair caught in the wind.

On my way to work, I pass dense mango trees sagging under the weight of their swelling fruit.

On my way to work, I pass a world that bleeds new-ness.  It sweats it from the cracks in the road and the holes in the trees.  Like a low hum, like some deep steady buzz, new-ness provides the soundtrack of my days.  Even the white-green stream of mystery liquid that trickles through the trash-clogged gutters in the morning seems alive, vibrant.

I know, though, that as time passes, the new-ness will fade like colored paper left in the sun–nothing will happen quickly; nothing will alert me to its shifting.  I’ll simply arrive at the office one morning and have no recollection of the things I passed on the way there.  The boda ride will morph into a seven-minute haze, a dusty, bouncy, bleary-eyed morning commute.  For now though, thankfully, things are fresh.

I’ve made it to Gulu!  I just had my first day at the office today.  Everyone at Invisible Children has been so welcoming and kind.  I’m staying in a staff house here with two other Invisible Children staffers.  Everything has been going really well so far–there is a lot of information I need to absorb in the coming weeks, but luckily folks here are eager to answer my questions and offer up help when I need it.  I’m sorry I haven’t been posting content to the site in the past few weeks.  I’ve been writing, I just haven’t been able to put aside time to work on the internet.  Hopefully, now that I’m settling in here, I’ll have time in the next few days to start putting some posts up on the site.  It’s been hectic the past few weeks!

I hope everyone is doing well,

A

A teacher named Kimberly left me a comment a few days ago and didn’t leave her correct email address.  Kimberly, if you’re reading this, send it to me again.  Thanks!

Above: The Atacama Desert looks like another world compared to the lush fields of flowers further south

Tuesday 11/11/08 Valparaiso, Chile

One of the most amazing things I’ve been able to witness on the trip has been the fading of Chile’s Atacama Desert into a flower-studded, bird-clouded, wave-battered stretch of coastline.

The Atacama Desert, home to some parched pieces of planet that have never received any recorded rainfall, has no visible boundary line with Chile’s lush midsection, the terrain that surrounds Santiago to the west and immediate south. Over the course of hundreds of kilometers starting in the southern Atacama, across a distance that takes days and days to cover by bicycle, barren sand dunes and rocky desert mountains slowly morph into fields of scrappy, wind-tattered shrubbery and cacti; cacti give way to taller shrubs and plants; lone flowers poke up through the sand looking out of place and, ever so slowly as the road heads south, swell into clusters and healthy tangles. Like a glacier slipping into the sea, the desert’s harshness loses itself in the vitality of spring flowers and morning bird song.

Again, I feel fortunate to have stumbled upon sacred terrain.

Above: This is what the driest place on Earth looks like–The Atacama Desert in Chile

I just uploaded a ton of pictures to my Flickr page. If you want to have a look, go here.

Above: Something was alive in the skies that morning

Monday 9/22/08 Puno, Peru

Riding a bicycle through sacred places changes your physical being. Your breathing slows while your heart quickens. A calm sweeps over you that seeps into the deepest parts of your mind, muting all frenetic thoughts. Your eyes widen and your sense of alertness heightens.

Somehow, in these really special places, you become sewn into the world around you and pass through it not as an imposter but as a piece of itself, just as an iceberg moves through the sea. Noticing the connectivity of all things, the one-ness pulsing through all that exists in the universe, is unavoidable.

No matter how foreign your surroundings are in reality, despite how far you are from your hometown or your family, you could not feel more at home, more perfectly situated in time and space. Time slows and its passing becomes observable. It takes on a heaviness to it that is often absent during moments of things like check-book-balancing, newspaper-reading, and after-work-grocery-buying. Basically, in the quieting, sacred places, the world takes you in and stuns you.

For a few short hours in the early morning of Saturday September 20, 2008, I felt this way. The stretch of Earth that thrust me into such a state was about 50 miles of near-flat terrain between the pueblos of Santa Rosa and Pukara in southeastern Peru.

Above: Morning skies over a stunning blend of vibrant hues near Santa Rosa, Peru

Within the first few moments of riding, I could tell it was going to be a different type of morning. The sky glowed a brilliant blue and the white clouds that tattooed it looked crystalline, almost edible, like smeared icing on a massive blue sheet cake. The moon, like some ghostly white astral vampire, vanished into thin air as the morning sun took command of the day. For miles and miles around, dry tufts of golden grass blanketed the ground. Mountains spiked up through the earth and lined the horizon in all directions. The yellows of the grasses, the blues of the sky, the whites of the clouds, the blacks of the band of asphalt that shot straight out in front of me like a ray of black gray light—all blended together to create a scene of raw beauty. In the brisk chill of morning, the place had a cool heartiness to it, a feeling of harshness that made me feel vulnerable and cautious amidst it.

Above: YES!!! THIS is what it’s all about…

I wasn’t the only one populating the wide expanses of flat wilderness that morning. I passed barefoot sheep herders with whips in their hands, prodding along their flocks by the roadside. The soles of their feet, thick and creased, carried them unflinchingly over rocky paths. The homes of these people were mud-walled and grass-roofed.

I passed cyclists, morning commuters, on old bikes with wobbly wheels. With 20 miles or more between towns and a standard of meager incomes that makes car ownership an impossibility, people who live here in the open pampa have to travel if they hope to earn steady money.

Every once in a while, a cargo truck or a car would blow by me so quickly that I was sure its driver was ignorant of the sacredness of his surroundings. Sure, drivers would honk or wave, sometimes even scream out some message of encouragement, but never on that magical stretch of road did I feel (or could I feel) any sort of communion with people fueled by a mindset so drastically different than my own. They were late for jobs or breakfasts or deliveries or something or other; I, on the other hand, was neither late nor early for anything. My timing was just right. I was too present to be late or feel as if lateness was even a valid thing.

Above: A mixed herd of alpacas and sheep crossing the road

Above: Tilling the hard way

These types of mornings make all the hard days worth the sweat and exhaustion. They don’t come often, but when they do, they put me in my place and leave me feeling like the creature I am. Riding through cities or on terrain that lets the mind wander, I often feel like a man, like a cyclist traveling through a place with a mindful of human thoughts. But on the special stretches of road, the sacred stretches, I’m left feeling like a natural creature, a component of the universe.

These sacred stretches bring me home and anchor me. They give me precious glimpses of the under-light of existence that our routines often outshine.

Above: This is what living completely off the grid in Peru looks like

If I rode with believers of various religions that morning, they’d describe the energy around me using different names.   They might disagree on its origins or its reason for enveloping us at that place and time, but they’d all agree on its existence.  Its presence was obvious in the atmosphere of the scene.  The colors seemed brighter.  The air was fresher.  The sky just a bit wider.  Something extra was there that morning, and I feel grateful to have experienced it, even if it lasted but a few short hours.

I want to send a HUGE thank you to my sponsors!! When my parents met me in Lima, they brought a few supplies from the U.S. that different sponsors had sent me. Thank you!!!

Big Agnes, the Colorado-based company that makes my tent, sent me a new tent pole free of charge. Their customer service is exceptional (thank you for your help Chris!), their email responses come quickly, and they make high-quality products. Thank you Big Agnes!

Once again, Herb at REI’s Marlton store has saved me. He sent a box of bike supplies down with my parents that helped me spruce the bike up like new. This is the second box of bike stuff that Herb has helped me with (I picked up the first box in Costa Rica). Without people like him helping me out and supporting me back in the states, this trip would be 10 times harder. Herb, thank you! REI Marlton, thank you!

Copper Bottom Sales, a new outdoor supply company based out of New Jersey, sent me a compass and agreed to help me out in the future with clothes, should I need them. Joe Rand, the company’s founder, supports climb-for-charity events and is an avid climber. If you are an outdoor retailer looking to purchase gear from a grass roots company, check them out. Thank you Copper Bottom Sales!

*****

After four long days on the bike, I am now in Ayacucho, Peru. The roads between Huancayo and Cusco are mostly dirt and will take me over a few 4,000+ meter passes (and down into a few 2,000 meter valleys as well). I have been off the bike now for seven weeks and my legs and butt are definitely out of shape. Although I know that the next week of riding will be some of the hardest on my trip, I’m hoping my body will quickly adjust to the bumpy roads and hard cycling routine.

I’m trying to upload almost all of my pictures from my parent’s visit today. Obviously, though, I won’t post the majority of them to this site because it’s too time consuming. To view all of my pictures, just click the Flickr strip of pictures to the right of this post.

Again, thank you to the various people and companies who have sponsored me on this trip so far. Your support not only helps me materially, but you give me a big boost in morale as well. Thank you!