About

Have you ever sat there and thought about just how much there is about the world that you don’t know?

This idea has frightened me for quite some time. If even the smartest, most memory intelligent people all compiled together do not know even a small portion of all the information about all that there is, how could I hope to grasp even a tiny fraction of our world?

Our world. The visible. The invisible. The landscapes. The waters. The mountains. The plains. The animals. The insects. The plants. The people who dwell on it, the people who now lay in it. The people yet to grace it.

There’s just so much out there.

It’s not necessarily that I struggle with learning infomation and storing it in my brain, but motivation to learn things from a book is often low. Reading things on the internet, watching videos, trying to internalise everything intellectually–it just isn’t being internalised. Like many of you, I think I lean more towards experiential learning. Yes, I can do all of the recommended things teachers say to try and help you know more; I can visualise and put things in logical order, explain things outloud, everything. But the things I actually remember, the things that have stuck with me my entire life, have been when connecting back to my own personal experience.

See, just like many humanitarians, teachers, lawyers, and doctors, it often takes something personal to kickstart the passion for our work. A friend in extreme poverty, a bad teacher, a childhood in foster homes, a sister who died from cancer.. these experiences and relationships will often push us to grow and change, and to want to make change. Personal experiences aren’t necessarily always the motivation for the work we want to pursue, but they often influence it.

Meeting people and hearing their stories is what influences me. It holds so much weight in my heart and mind, and there is rarely a time when I forget someone who has told me their experiences. I want to know every detail of their lives, what brought them to where they are. It motivates me to seek out change, to question how I think, to connect people to other people. I am left with a high of wonder of who else or what else I could know.

So my work is done in an effort to come alongside people and places that are too likely to be overlooked or unseen. I want to know the widely unknown. Very much of me wants to tick off the bucketlist locations and Instagram-worthy shots, but an even greater sense in me wants to experience the world through the breaths, eyes and lives of the people who live in it.

I don’t want to just see the world. I want to know the world.