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The Book of the Week is “We Came We Saw We Left [sic; no punctuation], A Family Gap Year” by Charles Wheelan, published in 2021.
Beginning in September 2016, two American parents and their three teenagers (two daughters and younger son) went on an eight-and-a-half-month world tour to obscure, and even dangerous places. The family’s travel nurse advised them about which vaccines and drugs to get, so as to keep them healthy. Even so, one of the daughters contracted leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating parasite.
While they were in Colombia, citizens were getting ready to vote on a referendum whether to reward FARC (the political group) with cash and seats in their country’s Congress, rather than punish them with long prison sentences– to get them to stop their decades-long kidnappings, killings and drug trafficking.
The parents home-schooled their kids on the trip. The rebellious, deadline-missing daughter behaved thusly: “Sophie spent the subsequent twenty-four hours [before an academic deadline] texting, posting on Facebook, watching Netflix– everything but sending the thank-you note…”
As with any long, multi-cultural trip, the family had adventures. Two of the family members took a twelve-hour round-trip via taxi to the consulate in Mandalay to get visas to enter India, because they saw that the initial consulate they visited in Myanmar (formerly Burma) was going to give them the bureaucratic run-around, even if they were to offer the clerk ample bribes. Further, they needed to have all of their fingerprints taken to get the visas to enter India. One daughter had lost a finger at a young age. The software in the fingerprint-taking machine could not deal with that.
Read the book to learn of the family’s many other adventures, on an obviously life-threatening but eye-opening, uniquely educational kind of trip that is not for everyone.