I´ve been on the road for the last year and a half with a traveling high school that is working to provide girls with a new perspective on education and the world. We learn about the economics, politics, environmental issues, history, and language of the regions that we travel through by talking to local people and eng...

I´ve been on the road for the last year and a half with a traveling high school that is working to provide girls with a new perspective on education and the world. We learn about the economics, politics, environmental issues, history, and language of the regions that we travel through by talking to local people and engaging with local issues. After this semester I come home, having finally come so much closer to knowing and understanding what that means. These issues we face in the world reflect a loss of culture and community in so many different places - and the pain of middle-upper class privileged white people is different but no less real than those in other situations around the world. It manifests in its young people the way such pain does anywhere else. We long for an external struggle - and thus send our guilt-alleviating checks, and volunteer for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, before returning to our lives. If anything, the people that I know and come from suffer deeply exactly because we have swallowed the oppressor and it is to us like a parasite. But instead of an other to fight against, our struggle is in the process of separating ourselves from something that has eaten its way into our very cores, that each day determines our identity and tells us that we aren´t good enough and never will be. It is this same something that causes us to continue to take in without ever questioning the active and passive oppression that we perpetrate around the world as a result.

I´m at 4Real because I believe that the only way to move forward is to recognize that the issues we face in each population around the world are the many sides of the same coin. I have spent many years traveling and seeking a culture or a cause or a purpose to work towards. Ultimately, I cannot change that I grew up as a white girl from Maine, where I went to school, the culture that I inherited. What I can do is see my own people as legitimate and necessary parts of this struggle - and to work to hear, learn from, teach, and gather...and then I can come not in charity or in pity or in remorse or in guilt, but instead in solidarity to move forward.