Twice our family has travelled into the developing world, volunteering through World Medical Mission, the auspices of Samaritan’s Purse. Our youngest was three when we first travelled to rural Kenya, and our eldest was a teenager at our last trip into rural Ghana.

Besides learning to travel with four kids, we were also driving ten hours to the airport, taking a domestic flight then a European flight, adjusting to the time zone for three days in a European city—we also had two more flights, one into the continent of Africa, another into a more rural location, and finally, a three hour ambulance ride to our final destination . . . this ain’t no Disney cruise ship experience!

Since my nursing registration had long elapsed, I knew I wasn’t certified to work alongside my husband, a medical doctor in the hospital, learning how to adjust to hospitals that didn’t routinely measure electrolytes or consistent access to glucometers or have a schedule to clean the OR linens before the slate day. But I certainly didn’t expect that the ordinary things in life would be as demanding as they were either.

1. Water sanitation practices took more time in our day than any other activity. The amount of time one needs to just survive is lightyears from the western experience. It’s why people come back stone-faced, declaring, “We’re very thankful for our experience.” We take for granted water sanitation, plumbing, and lack of water-infused diseases. The pricey, but efficient, LifeStraw technology or UV light-bacteria/protozoa destroying technology is easily purchased in back country travel shops in Canada. The expense is well worth the time saved. We learned to travel with those technologies the second time around.
2. Our part of the world is taught to be sensitive to people we perceive to be different from us. That isn’t the case everywhere. Our Alberta and Ontario-born children felt mighty uncomfortable when children tried to wipe away the white from their skin to find the black underneath. People laughed and pointed us out in the market, “Muzungus, muzungus” (white people, white people). I understood why. These people don’t all have televisions with Friends translated into every language, and we were clearly out of the ordinary in very rural African towns. But kids don’t like to be laughed at either. The second time around, we prepared in advance for a discussion on how we are perceived and what to do when people highlight it.
3. Much of our part of the world doesn’t encourage patriarchy and selling girls into marriage. Though I know that the Western world isn’t the only part of the world that doesn’t sell girls into marriage, we weren’t expecting to have routine marriage proposals. Even our youngest son was proposed to. The first time it felt amusing, flattering, and even entertaining. The third time and beyond felt presuming, stifling, and awkward. Kids didn’t feel seen, they felt like a “Western commodity.”
4. Bring the highest form of DEET you can find. If you’re averse to possibly cancer-encouraging lotions, reconsider your travels, and take the Malarone option for malaria, not the potential doxycycline alternative. My family took the Malarone. I felt horrible with it the first time; so I chose doxy the second trip. The first night I remember getting a mosquito bite, but I’ve had so many of those living in northern Alberta as a child, I didn’t think it was a guarantee I’d contract malaria. But Canadian mosquitos die from the blessed winter season. Malaria didn’t feel nearly as bad as the case of whooping cough I contracted, but my husband said that was because I wasn’t conscious for a few days.
5. And speaking of bugs. . . You can never have enough mosquito netting on your bed; sew those holes. You can never wear long sleeve clothing long enough, right into bedtime. But think bugs are your friends because there are a lot of bugs. I don’t generally have a bug aversion, but I was pretty frightened by the local kids jumping into high grasses to catch scorpions to show us, watching giant carpenter bees burrowing into the wood of our home, feeling a giant bug the size of my palm crawling up my leg in the shower after I was recovering from malaria, where one of my moments awake was shewing a bug . . . a scorpion! Apparently, it was less interested in me in my malarial state. If you don’t think bugs are your friends, you’ll not be able to tolerate the environment.
6. Bring the kids to the bathroom before church. It will be a while.
7. Many people, the world over, have similar values. People are just people. Some of us have indoor plumbing; some of us don’t. Some of us die from preventable diseases, too; many of us don’t. Some of us have enough food in the pantry; some of us don’t. Some of us have clean drinking water; way too many of us don’t. But people are people. We value our friends, families, and communities. We want connection and health and purpose. We’re pretty similar. Most people are not to be feared. Kids can safely travel to most places in the world.
8. My kids didn’t want to hear that their travel wasn’t meaningful because their family was volunteering in the developing world. The developing world doesn’t want to be pitied. No one does. And sharing our resources, sharing our time, and sharing our ideas, is sharing, not pitying. Everyone is a valuable human being and deserves respect. Sharing resources is a benefit to having much though, and not everyone in North America gets that sharing resources isn’t pitying. If I had a fresh water well while the town next to me had a water shortage, I’d share. That wouldn’t be pity. It would be pity if I went to stare outside their town and comment on how horrible their lives must be and then take photos, too. Our kids were taught to speak to these people the same way we spoke to anyone: kindly, respectfully, and authentically.
9. The entire experience is like one really expensive field trip for the kids, as long as you are open to other people’s experiences and willing to listen. One day, the kids and I travelled to a very remote private Christian school in the mountains, accessible by a dangerous mountainside taxi ride and an hour walk. We were welcomed eagerly without appointment with the school principal. Before our visit’s end, the entire school came out to sing for us, and we were given a twenty pound bag of dried beans. Being an ambassador for the Western world’s education system was kinda surprising. Especially since (a.) I’m not part of the education system at all, since I’m far removed as a registered homeschooler in British Columbia. And (b.) I am not aware of nor concern myself with learning outcomes, standardized testing, and all things educationese. But this field trip within the African field trip was definitely “going to school” for the kids!
10. There are moments of exhilaration that only travel can provide. Do we see where we are when we look up into the black sky with its twinkling lights? We might never see the stars sitting in these southern hemisphere positions above us as we do now. Do we see that toddler strapped to her mother's back, all skin and bones? The threesome riding the back of that motorcycle? The chubby little black babies tucked into their mommy's sides in brilliant coloured fabrics? The taste of half-flavoured candies sitting in plastic bins on the shopkeepers' table? Do we know how far we have walked into the lonely wilderness of western Africa, as we pass four feet high millet stalks and dip our toes into a lonely splash of a creek? Exhilarating moments!