To Know Yourself, Travel with a Purpose

We sat around a wooden table with upright chairs cramped under blue skies and intense rays from the August sun. Black and white photographs surrounded us on the whitewashed walls of the Centro de Fotografía Álvarez Bravo.

“She’s not ready,” my fellow classmates commented, on my internal deliberation about my future, a future with or without children.

I had come to Oaxaca alone, to Travel with a Purpose—a fact I had discovered about myself after ten months backpacking in Asia five years before. I was in a three-year relationship, and it was my first time on the road without him. Excited about the “alone” part, I was traveling solo, but not single. This was a new experience, and I’m a glutton for new experiences. I just hoped that this solitary travel would give me something other than a local handcraft to take home.

Photography and writing had been mapped out as future career paths for me for months, and I knew that travel had to be part of that. Through my research, I found Duke University’s Literacy through Photography Workshops, where Wendy Ewald taught a writing and photography curriculum for children. In the Oaxaca workshop, my passion for children, photography, writing, and travel would come together.

Wendy was known around the world for her work in the seventies with kids in the Appalachian Mountains. Later, she explored race, post-apartheid, with children in South Africa. Last year she had a global audience for her work with the children of asylum seekers in the UK. Her goal has always been to put the camera back in children’s hands, as a way to learn about their world and about themselves.

In Oaxaca, we were Wendy’s students. Our first assignment was to write a self-portrait, and then go out to the cobblestone streets of this UNESCO World Heritage town and shoot photographs illustrating our self-portraits. I read my self-portrait to a diverse group of fifteen: a retired photographer and his wife from Maryland, a beautiful single Argentine woman, and to a middle-school teacher and her onetime student—now in college—who had joined her here. My feelings on the future were read to mature traveling hippies with children of their own, and young Mexican men who used their creativity in order to make ends meet. Somehow this collection of worldly scholars understood.