"Taking time off and heading abroad"

BY BRIAN GREGGS!

This semester I will not be at Willamette. Instead I will be traveling through South America for three months with five Willamette students and one student from Knox College. When people ask me why I'm going, I get uneasy, because I start to think of all the things I hope for, but don't dare talk about.
What would I like is to be able to state my purpose and intentions nobly, rather than to blanch at this embarrassing cataract of malformed and dubious longings and aspirations that swells up occasionally.
Some of these are hopes for myself: Maybe I'll gain a new perspective. Maybe I'll get in shape again. (Again?) Maybe I'll learn Spanish (unlikely). Maybe I'll learn Kichwa (much less likely). Maybe I'll turn into a man! Oh god...
But even worse are my expectations for the land and the people, the ignoble byproducts of a life of media saturation. These expectations are an unholy gumbo of "The Three Caballeros," "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," "Romancing the Stone," sundry Wikipedia entries, Tintin and more Disney comic book adventure stories that I care to count.
I'm looking forward to seeing cute little gauchitos and cannibals with sharp teeth and glistening yellow eyes. Perhaps a lost cache of molded Incan gold. Has El Dorado been discovered?
Enough of all this foolishness! Of course I know the world isn't really like that. Maybe that's why I'm going... because I don't know what it's like? Anyway. In subsequent op-eds (which hopefully won't be so heavy) I'll report on our own South American adventures, as we make our way south from Quito to Santiago, and attempt to fix some meaning to this trip beyond that of a vacation.