How Eating Snails Changed My Life: A Story About Traveling

By Elizabeth Gibbs

As I grabbed my backpack and walked toward the van taking us to SeaTac, my friends and I were surrounded by crying, fearstruck family members. There was this nervous air surrounding us, yet I didn’t quite understand why. Was going to North Africa really going to be that scary?

When I get asked as to why I like to travel, the first thing I say is, “To experience new cultures and meet amazing people.” Having lived in America all my life, I started creating this safe little bubble. The starving kids or hurricane-ravaged cities seemed so far away. Those countries and people living in them started to become “others” to me.

When I began to tell people I was going to North Africa back in March 2016, the first thing they’d say to me was normally along the lines of, “Is that really safe?” Or “You should probably go somewhere more welcoming.” Yet, not one of these people had visited the country I was going to.

While on my trip, some of my friends and I visited a woman living in one of North Africa’s larger cities. Without even knowing who we were, she welcomed us into her tiny home with open arms. Right away, we were sat down and given food. We laughed together as we watched Saudi Arabia soap dramas and drank mint tea. Through a translator, she told us her story, crying as she held up pictures of her loved ones. Her story was a sad one, with her husband having another family he lives with and the struggle to provide for her children, yet there was so much giving in her. Even with the language barrier, I felt so connected with this lady. Leaving was the hardest part, for as she gave me a kiss on each cheek, I couldn’t help but think that I would never see her again.

This woman was one of the people my friends and family were telling me was unsafe, merely because she lived in North Africa.

This is why traveling is so valuable. The people I met along the way showed me just how ignorant of a life I had been living. Suddenly, they became real people with real problems, feelings, and families. People with real lives. No longer was I an outsider, living on the other side of the world, pretending to know how these people live, act and interact with one another. Instead, I was being welcomed into their homes and treated like one of them. And not because I asked to, but because they wanted me to.

As I prepare to leave for North Africa once again in the fall, I call out the crying and the “it’s not safe over there.” I tell my friends and family about being welcomed into homes of strangers and being taught how to make traditional meals, or being brought to “secret” local places and eating snails. I talk about the friendliness and love I experienced by almost every single person I met. The laughs, tears, hugs, and blessings. But most of all, I urge them to go.

I urge them to go out of their comfort zones and greet the world like friends. To not deem places of being unsafe because of appearance, the media, or prejudice. I urge them to go experience the world outside of the tiny bubble the people of America has created for themselves. Because that, that is what changed my life.

Will you let it change yours?