A nave and reckless tourist...or
[Laughter]
[Music]
this
is what it could look like traveling
through a country at war
or this or this
or this two years ago
i was backpacking around afghanistan in
the same way as i had experienced
countries before that in order to get
the
purest and most genuine travel
experience
i always try to see places through the
eyes of the local people
and i do so by staying with strangers
who are kind enough
to host people like me who are on a
quest for authentic
travel experiences many of my hosts were
full of wanderlust themselves
so for a young afghan like nasser who i
stayed with in kabul
one way of traveling was through the
experience of hosting people from
different cultures
he would list this place on an online
platform called
couchsurfing where i had found the
profile of both him
and his friend so through an officer’s
friend
i had the chance to not only visit the
local afghan school where he was working
but also to give a guest lecture to his
english class students
the kids there were delighted to have a
visitor from far away
and were eagerly asking questions about
what life was like
in my country and they also gave me some
insight into what life was like in
theirs
to my astonishment i found out that
hiking is also a national activity in
afghanistan
and i got to join nasser and his friends
for a hike
and a picnic in the pancha valley
you guys have to simply imagine us
sitting there and
chatting about trivial things like
dating culture
favorite foods and movie actors
it was remarkable to think about how
much i had in common with these young
men
who were living in a country very
different to my own
and the more i talked with these people
the more i realized how limited my
understanding of this place had been
alongside with all of the war and the
terror
that is clearly going on there there was
also a reality which was
much more rich and much more complex
it was a reality which also had a lot
more beauty
and a lot more peace than i had imagined
i almost couldn’t wait to share this
finding with my friends back home
so when an international press agency
asked me for an
interview i felt like this was the
perfect opportunity to share the story
not just with my friends but to share it
with the whole world
for almost two hours i was sitting in
nassar’s living room
answering the questions from this
journalist before she left
me there high in expectation for the
article that was going to be published
but unfortunately
once the article was released all of my
excitement disappeared
the story did simply not voice out the
idea
i had wanted to convey
you can imagine i was absolutely
devastated by seeing this
i was hurt and i was disappointed
even more so as the article spread like
a plague
of misinformation and ended up in nearly
100
newspapers around the world like fox
news
your news the telegraph
i cannot understand why these newspapers
had to present me
as a naive and reckless traveler to
their millions of readers
for sure i had failed to communicate my
idea
and for a long time i was bashing myself
for not sending a clear enough message
but eventually i realized that perhaps
there was another question
which i should have been asking myself
am i naive for traveling the way that i
do
i knew that i had not been clueless back
home my parents had been fostering two
afghan boys
who had become my brothers at heart
and the horrid grim and frightening
story
of young boys escaping from their homes
and
running for their lives is still
resonating in my mind
so through them i gained a great respect
and regard to this country
and i knew that such places was nowhere
to simply fool around
one month after leaving nasser and
afghanistan behind
i ventured into syria and already while
waiting for a taxi to take me from
lebanon
and into the syrian capital i met
another stranger who i would trust with
my life
nora was a single mother working as a
dancer
and invited me to spend the next days
living with her
in the suburb of damascus
she shared her one-bedroom apartment
with her
unemployed mother and her eight-year-old
daughter called nastya
and i would babysit nastia when both
nora and her mother was not at home
and through her school books we were
learning arabic numbers and words
together you guys can imagine
how much nora must have trusted me to
let me stay
with their only daughter me
who was a stranger from another culture
it was clear that the door of trust was
open both ways
and this experience with nora and her
family
gave me the confidence to travel
independently to other cities
throughout syria afterwards so
the fact that i got to see as much of
syria as i did
and to get a little bit of an
understanding of what life was like
there during the war
was all thanks to the fact that i had
been naive
and trusted a stranger who i shared a
taxi ride with
and my experience with such wonderful
people are not just limited
to nasser and nora by now i have stayed
with over a hundred such strangers
ranging from the slums of liberia to a
huge mansion in kuwait
all who have become my trusted friends
you see for syria and afghanistan as for
the other 193 countries i
visited i had to bring along a basket
full of trust
and to be honest it wasn’t always a
choice
sometimes it was rather a necessity as i
simply did not have the time
to fully build my confidence in people
in a more cautious way
so i offered this trust basket to those
who trusted me enough
to let me stay in their homes
and this social connection has become my
core reason to keep on traveling
even after some pretty tough challenges
i have faced along the way
like being interrogated and imprisoned
being robbed
and even stabbed in my hand on one
occasion
you can call me naive if you want but
this word
does no longer hurt me in the same way
as it used to
because i know that it is my openness to
strangers
that is my key to getting to know places
and its people
and for making friends wherever i go
so maybe we all just need
to be a little more naive to genuinely
get to know the people around us
and maybe instead of meeting people with
an empty basket of trust
we can all put a dash more into it
and i believe that if we all do this we
might
all realize that strangers
are just friends who we have not gotten
to know yet thanks
you