Be watching for the link to a facebook group about the trip, and for a link to the group blog. Journey with us.
In the last few days, in reading what I will post below, I have realized that the only thing better than the passion and excitement and movement and "spiders and broken glass, and decay and rage and fur and feathers, and dirt and shit and the love of God" found in being a part of a community who seek to reconstitute the world daily--people moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness with the living world, that so desperately needs all of us to fight for it, and each other, daily...
The only thing better than that, is doing it standing next to your brother.
Artist: Chris Gracey (roomie love)So this is what David wrote, about this summer, to the four other guys who are going on the trip:
"Strive to be what only you can be. Strive to want what everyone else may have as well."
-Lanza del Vasta
Will Watson, Justin Zhao, Andrew Childress, Connor Myers, David Watson.
This summer, the five of us are going to write a really big story.
It’s funny how this story starts- in my journal, the entry for November 24, 2009 simply reads, “Read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller.”
Nothing in there at all about a cross-country bike trip. Not a word about looking out the window of an airplane hurtling through the air several miles above the ground and realizing I was about to be living my life completely differently. Yet that was the day when something really big started moving, something that has moved me to reimagine everything I thought I knew about myself.
I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, and about a year and a half ago, I realized I was going to work in places where there aren't doctors, places most people really don’t want to get any closer to than the occasional uncomfortable news bulletin splashing across the screen just long enough to fill the time between the mashed potatoes and pork chops, sandwiched somewhere between sports and weather. Call me naïve, but for a seventeen year old, I had a pretty good idea of what that decision was going to mean and what kind of life I was looking forward to, and that conviction turned out to be pretty powerful. I rode the strength of that passion into Duke University, a kid with a big dream who had been living on a farm in North Texas a few months before.
For pre-med freshmen studying global health, at this point in Duke University life, most people go and do global health projects during the summer- Africa, South America, Southeastern Asia. And I always thought that's what I would be doing too- never even gave a thought to doing anything else.
But as my first semester of college wore on, I found myself less and less sure a global health project was what I should be doing this summer. I'm just a college student- I don't have any medical skills. I don't speak any languages besides English. And it might cost more than I can afford- duke has plenty of funding available, but there was no guarantee I would get any, and Duke’s tuition is more than enough strain on any family without adding expensive plane tickets to the total.
Increasingly dissatisfied, I began to think, what can I do with the skills I have now? How can I, a teenager who really has nothing to offer, best serve other people, the people who are the poorest, most destitute? How can I serve the people the world has forgotten, ignored, turned away from? And to be honest, I had no idea. No clue whatsoever.
And then I read a book. (If you’re also trying to find out where to begin your story, I recommend you try this out; it’s a pretty good place to start). At the beginning of Thanksgiving break, on my flight back home, I finally picked up Donald Miller’s newest book. Things had been pretty rough for me for a few months and I had lost sight of where I was going, and he hit me right in the chest. Part of the book was about a cross-country bike trip the author had been a part of for Blood:Water Mission that raised $200,000 in a single summer. And I remember thinking as I looked out the window, eyes wandering across a particularly stunning sunset of gold and red, hmm. I could do that.
But for a few months, it was really just an idea. You have to understand, I don't ride bikes- don't even own one. But I started talking about it, and people responded. Students, bike shop workers, and people I barely knew told me they had always wanted to do a trip like this someday- especially my roommate Justin. That's what really made me sure I wanted to do this- I knew my brother Will would be totally on board, but having someone else who was absolutely sure they were willing to commit was a huge mental step. And that's also what started the idea of creating a group that would help college students plan and carry out advocacy/fundraising trips like this. So this will be Boundless at Duke's first summer adventure, a project I hope will grow into something much bigger in the future.
I think I also knew right from the beginning, from the moment I read that book on the airplane, that I wanted this trip to be about Falling Whistles. I'm probably going to spend a good bit of my life in that part of the world, and through Will, I knew the whistleblowers’ story. I knew this was the sort of project Falling Whistles would support, and that as a relatively young organization, the results of our trip would mean more to FW than it would to another, larger NGO. There are a thousand organizations who do great work and who I would have loved to support, but I believe in Falling Whistles' story and cause. When Sean's life collided with those five kids in Titu, something big happened. The war in Congo destroys everything, everyone that it touches. I really don't have words for this part of the story. Maybe Sean said it best: "But when these boys told me of the whistleblowers, the horror grew feet and walked within me." I have read, heard, seen, so, so many stories- and not with the eyes of someone who has seen excruciating poverty and devastating violence, but all too often with detachment, cynicism. But I knew this one was real, that this cause meant something. The war in Congo is incredibly, intensely complex and complicated- not something a few hundred activists can hope to end. But for me, that's what Falling Whistles is about- not just the war in Congo, but learning to face huge, unsolvable problems together, as a community. And Falling Whistles’ message is about exactly what we're doing this summer-
What can we do with who we are?
The world probably won't change colors and stop spinning when we get to the west coast this summer, but we will have told a story to thousands of people all across the country, and many of them will be different than they were before. After all, that's how we heard the story- someone told Will, and Will told me and Connor and Andrew, and I told Justin. Maybe we'll raise some money too.
Excited doesn't really capture how I feel about this trip- I know it's going to be awful at times and I'm going to want to quit on day two when I wake up and can't move, and I'm going to want to buy a plane ticket when we hit the Rockies. I'm going to want to quit when my old wrist injury gets worse again and is so sore I can't move it anymore. I've already wanted to give up plenty of times. But I know this is going to be something that will define some part of who we are. Biking 3,000 miles makes an impression on more than just your ass. I'm going to get to spend a month and a half with four people who are some of my best friends in the world, and I'm going to get to watch all of them change and grow as the trip goes on. We're going to tell great stories after this summer.
So I suppose I'll end with something I want everyone else to share as well. Me and Justin have talked a bit about a memory we want to have of the trip. Think about one thing, one moment that you're going to look back on, we told each other.
For me, that's the moment when we're riding down towards the coast, the last few minutes of our trip. We're yelling and screaming, probably racing to see who can get there first. The sun's setting as we ride out onto the beach. Falling Whistles HQ and maybe some of our parents and friends are there, ready to celebrate with us. When we hit the beach, we either ditch our bikes and run into the ocean or just ride straight into the water; I haven't decided yet. We're all going nuts as the totality of the trip, the immensity of what we've just done hits us. We'll be screaming and laughing as we tackle each other into the ocean and hug our friends and family. Depending on how sore my butt is, I might pick up my bike and sling it as far into the water as I can; I don't care if it rusts. Maybe I'll just start swimming towards the sun. And the whole time, the Falling Whistles crew and whoever's there on the beach will be taking pictures and laughing and celebrating with us.
Then maybe we'll start crying when we think about how hard it was to climb the Rockies, how deeply we had to search for the strength to get back on our bikes every day those first two weeks, how much it hurt when we fell off our bikes and didn’t want to get back up. How pissed we were when someone didn't cook dinner or help set up the tent. How beautiful the stars were in the desert, how peaceful it was in the middle of nowhere. What it was like to be away from the constant grind of technology and modern haste that so wears on me here at Duke. How awesome it was to sit around the fire and play guitar and sing and tell stories. We'll think about all the people we talked to; all the whistles we sold, all the people we met and who helped us. We'll remember what it felt like, a month and a half ago, to fall asleep listening to the Atlantic Ocean knowing we'd wake up the next morning and ride all day, and the day after that, and the day after that. We'll remember how beautiful the trees in North Carolina and Tennessee were. We'll see again the endless fields in Kansas, the beauty of the mountains in Colorado. And we'll look at each other and think about how close we've grown over the past month and a half, how proud we are of each other for finishing the trip. They’re already like family to me, but I don't think you can put into words what it'll be like after sharing something like this.
And when I look at all the pictures of us on the beach, that's what I want to see; I want to remember everything all at once.
That's what I want to remember. It's a long, long ways between there and here. But I think that’s what being a whistleblower is about- seeing the endless stretch of hills and plains and mountains and deserts between where the world is and where it could be, and having the strength to imagine a world changed, where Congo is free from the brutality and horror of endless war, where children no longer carry guns, where rape as a weapon of war is a distant memory. And with that imagination comes the resolve to put both feet on the pedals, even when it seems like the mountains aren’t coming any closer, when the wind is blowing harder than ever, when the temperature in the desert hits 115 degrees. Because in a few weeks we will reach the mountains that once seemed so far off, and a few weeks after that, we will find ourselves staring at the ocean, utterly blown away by the realization of what once seemed impossible.
Live your protest.
-David Watson
Photo by: Abby Ross
“Vocation is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
-Fredrick Buechner
“Remember this: do the thing that most enlivens you; yield to the call.”
-Dr. Paul Farmer
“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
When we saw people dying on the other side of the frontiers, we asked ourselves, ‘what is this border? It doesn’t mean anything to us.” Raymond Borel
“A great adventurer, a passionate lover of life, a free spirit with a questioning mind, an insatiable curiosity, an extraordinary resilience, and an indomitable spirit.”
-Erwin McManus
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