Nathaniel Kim served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Lofa County from 2017 to 2019. His blog, Innate Musings, is full of beautifully written, funny, thought- provoking essays. He has also been a guest writer for other blogs and sites, including the travel blog Mainly Misfits. Here is what he said:
“To love somebody is to necessarily let them change you. The romantic cliché of ‘two hearts becoming one’ is overdramatic, but it gets at a fundamental dynamic in relationships — they require two different people to walk the same road for a period of time and undergo a journey together. In healthy relationships, this leads to both people giving ground and meeting in the middle, each a little bit changed for the better as they’ve learned from each other and grown together. But far too often ill-intentioned people can exploit this dynamic, demanding sacrifices and wresting self-agency from their partner in the name of a corrupted definition of love.
However true this is for relationships between ourselves and other people, I’ve found more and more as I’ve traveled that it applies doubly for the relationships between ourselves and the places we visit. We travel from a position of ignorance, going to places that are not ours and interacting with people who are in some way different than we are. The goal is learning to navigate those places with a degree of comfort, and in doing so, bridging the gap between supposedly different peoples to find our shared humanity. We will never know everything about these places, just as people there will never fully understand our backgrounds. But by engaging in that same mutual sacrifice we use to grow in relationships, we can experience similar growth in ourselves.”
You can read the full article on Mainly Misfits, which is hosted by Sierra and Mel, the latter of whom also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cestos City, Liberia from 2017 to 2019.