HUMANITARIAN TRAVEL

Family and Friends-

Many of you know about my trip to India (February and March 2007), some of you may not have known I went at all. I’ve had so many people ask about the journey and I’ve found it so difficult to explore in small, conversation-sized bites, I decided I would write some of my thoughts and memories about it. Don’t feel obligated to read any or all of this. This is not publishable writing, and is more stream-of-consciousness than anything else. It will be my memories, and like anything in my memory cannot be trusted to be 100% accurate—I won’t be fact checking any of this until later when I develop some radically shortened version of the story for my magazine. Also, spelling is in the eye of the beholder with translating from Hindi to English—as we share no common alphabet, all spelling is done phonetically, and even when asking two people to spell something out in English, I frequently got two different versions…so I’ll use whatever phonetically sounds closest to me for names.

The idea of this trip had been haunting me for a few years—ever since I read a short paragraph-long blurb in an Adventure Travel magazine. It was a fantasy vacation that grabbed onto my imagination like a pitbull and would not let go. For fifteen days in late February and early March, I would join a group on horseback through the Thar Desert of Rajasthan, India, riding from one tiny remote village to the next, delivering school supplies, medical supplies, livestock, and working with the Indian Red Cross providing a free catarcat eye surgery camp and free medical camp to one of the poorest regions of India. We would camp in tents in the desert at night, and ride, sometimes seven hours a day, every day. It was the most intriguing trip I had ever heard of, a life-changing opportunity to combine adventure travel and humanitarian efforts in a country I’d always wanted to see. There was no way for me to predict how truly cinematic and huge the experience would be.

The inspiration of Alexander Souri, Relief Riders International (www.reliefridersinternational.com) teams with a local horseback adventure company to reach underserved rural communities. This is Alexander’s homage to his ancestry and his Indian father, as well as a way to promote community healing on a very human level. In it’s fourth year, RRI is changing the world one child, one ailing patient, one tiny village, one volunteer vacationer, at a time.


Our group of fourteen participants ranged in age from 24-70, eleven women and three men, twelve from America, one form Ireland and one from Belgium. I admit I was taken aback by finding I genuinely liked every single person in our group. A trip like ours self-selects some pretty amazing people. In the subset of travelers that is “horsey,” you know there won’t be any divas. Horse folk get dirty and physical and know what it is like to have to work (and play) hard. Factor in the even smaller subset of people who would spend vacation time doing volunteer work in such a difficult part of the world, and it adds up to a pretty special group. We were wildly different, yet bound by so many of the same intentions and priorities.

I won’t be writing here about the five days spent in Delhi and Agra (Taj Mahal)—they are their own Odyssey I’ll tackle elsewhere. Suffice to say I found urban India incredibly challenging emotionally, with more abject poverty than I’ve ever witnessed, anywhere in the world. In the rural villages I went for the Relief Riders trip, there wasn’t any more wealth nor creature comforts, but absent also was the desperation of the city. There are amazing sights to see in New and Old Delhi, and I met some fantastic people…and it was absolutely exhausting—physically, mentally, and spiritually. I’ll start this tale when I joined up with the Relief Riders group in a luxury hotel in Delhi.