Breanna is currently teaching English and leadership classes at the the only all-female institution of higher education in east Africa.
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Breanna Ribeiro -
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What improvements do you want to see the USA make in the next 5 years? Is money important or is the power of knowledge more crucial to you?
"I travel to expand my mind, to appreciate the diversity across human beings, and to understand the interconnectedness between humanity and the environment. Although my travels have taken me everywhere from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, from Western Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, everything I learn brings me back to the issues at home. Therefore, in my opinion, it is imperative that the United States do the following in the next five years:
- Lead the fight in combating global climate change. It’s real and everyone else in the world visibly sees the effects and calls it what it is, “impending global doom!”
- Eradicate institutional barriers that hinder economic justice for ninety-percent of Americans while benefitting just ten-percent. One statistic says it all, from 1980 to 2012 GDP continued to rise but zero percent of that growth went to the ninety-percent of the American population, while one-hundred percent of all new income produced in the United States during the 32 year span went to the top ten-percent richest people in America due to “trickle down” Republican economic theory. There cannot be equality in a society where the majority of citizens labor for the profit of the few. There cannot be equal opportunities to succeed in a society where minority CITIZENS are disproportionately impoverished, incarcerated, and lack adequate education and healthcare (hint: all of these factors are connected).
- Pass campaign finance laws and eliminate discriminatory state voting acts, both of which undermine the basic foundation of our representative democracy. How can we have a democracy—where citizens give power to elected representatives to lead—if corporations fund campaigns and effectively buy politicians? How can we have a democracy—where citizens give power to elected representatives to lead—if poor, Black, and Latino citizen’s ability to vote is suppressed by voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and voting disenfranchisement through a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates minority citizens? Every time I leave the United States, I am reminded of the many reasons why I am so fortunate to be a citizen of such an incredible country. I have come to believe that the true definition of a patriot is one who loves their country so much that they know it can DO better for its citizens, that it can BE better for its citizens. A true patriot believes in their country to such a degree that they dedicate their lives to shifting consciousness and legislation to achieve social and economic justice; because all citizens of such a beautifully complex country are entitled to their basic human rights and civil freedoms. A poor man deserves to equally enjoy the liberties that a man with wealth can. A Black man deserves to equally enjoy access to the opportunities that a man with White skin can. My travels have shown me that countries lacking in development and democracy look up to the United States of America as the archetype of opportunity, equality, and freedom. What hope do these countries have if the United States itself is slipping further and further away from the ideal that we call democracy?"
- Lead the fight in combating global climate change. It’s real and everyone else in the world visibly sees the effects and calls it what it is, “impending global doom!”
- Eradicate institutional barriers that hinder economic justice for ninety-percent of Americans while benefitting just ten-percent. One statistic says it all, from 1980 to 2012 GDP continued to rise but zero percent of that growth went to the ninety-percent of the American population, while one-hundred percent of all new income produced in the United States during the 32 year span went to the top ten-percent richest people in America due to “trickle down” Republican economic theory. There cannot be equality in a society where the majority of citizens labor for the profit of the few. There cannot be equal opportunities to succeed in a society where minority CITIZENS are disproportionately impoverished, incarcerated, and lack adequate education and healthcare (hint: all of these factors are connected).
- Pass campaign finance laws and eliminate discriminatory state voting acts, both of which undermine the basic foundation of our representative democracy. How can we have a democracy—where citizens give power to elected representatives to lead—if corporations fund campaigns and effectively buy politicians? How can we have a democracy—where citizens give power to elected representatives to lead—if poor, Black, and Latino citizen’s ability to vote is suppressed by voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and voting disenfranchisement through a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates minority citizens? Every time I leave the United States, I am reminded of the many reasons why I am so fortunate to be a citizen of such an incredible country. I have come to believe that the true definition of a patriot is one who loves their country so much that they know it can DO better for its citizens, that it can BE better for its citizens. A true patriot believes in their country to such a degree that they dedicate their lives to shifting consciousness and legislation to achieve social and economic justice; because all citizens of such a beautifully complex country are entitled to their basic human rights and civil freedoms. A poor man deserves to equally enjoy the liberties that a man with wealth can. A Black man deserves to equally enjoy access to the opportunities that a man with White skin can. My travels have shown me that countries lacking in development and democracy look up to the United States of America as the archetype of opportunity, equality, and freedom. What hope do these countries have if the United States itself is slipping further and further away from the ideal that we call democracy?"
What aspirations do you want to achieve in life?
Until recently, I had a hard time answering this question. With passions so intense and varied, it made it hard to narrow my answer into a concise aspiration. However, teaching in Georgia in Eastern Europe and Rwanda in sub-Saharan Africa, sparked my realization that what I want to achieve in life is to feel with, and for, my brothers and sisters around the world. I want to share these feelings through various mediums with the hope to inspire others to chase the sun and embrace the vulnerability of knowing and loving “the other”.
I’m a bit of a nerd, so I’ve studied the societies that I move to rather thoroughly, but it takes living amongst the people in any given society to really understand the culture and develop empathy with its people. Until a grandmother in Georgia told me about her earlier years as a young gynecologist risking her life for thirty years to provide desperate women abortions during the oppressive Soviet Union era, I could not truly understand the extent to which women living in post-Soviet Union countries had suffered and adapted. Not having access to contraception, the average woman in the Soviet Union had approximately fourteen abortions in her lifetime. Without safe and legal abortions, women sought dangerous back-alley solutions that often resulted in long-term medical complications, or death. With the extreme risks, why get the abortions? Well in a conservative and patriarchal setting, a woman who is impregnated out-of-wedlock has shamed her community, and effectively lost the ability to get married in the future and cannot financially support herself without help from a man’s breadwinning paycheck. That’s why.
It was not until I taught women whose lives had been scarred by genocide, did I understand the lasting effects of ethnic violence on a society. Teaching in a classroom of thirty students, and the majority of them had lost at least one immediate family member, if not both of their parents in the 1994 genocide, revealed to me the true definition of resiliency. Hearing the stories from my dear friend that he lost his mother to the genocide when he was just six years old, he the youngest of eleven brothers and sisters, had to live through genocidal violence as a toddler and then grow up without a mother and with a scarred father, leaves me aching and numb.
It is so easy to see only the differences between yourself and others, but once you start wandering and engaging with the beautiful people in our world, you begin to appreciate the differences rather than see them as obstacles; and you find that the similarities shine brighter than the differences ever could. Our common human needs for affection, nourishment, and shelter, make us equals as well as family.
Feeling the residual pain of my students and friends, but knowing that I could never understand the depths of their hurt, is when I feel most human. I could shelter myself from these feelings, either by remaining in my comfortable environment in the United States or by choosing not to engage with the local culture by surrounding myself with expatriates, but I choose to welcome the horror and the ecstasy equally. This is what being human is really about.
I’m a bit of a nerd, so I’ve studied the societies that I move to rather thoroughly, but it takes living amongst the people in any given society to really understand the culture and develop empathy with its people. Until a grandmother in Georgia told me about her earlier years as a young gynecologist risking her life for thirty years to provide desperate women abortions during the oppressive Soviet Union era, I could not truly understand the extent to which women living in post-Soviet Union countries had suffered and adapted. Not having access to contraception, the average woman in the Soviet Union had approximately fourteen abortions in her lifetime. Without safe and legal abortions, women sought dangerous back-alley solutions that often resulted in long-term medical complications, or death. With the extreme risks, why get the abortions? Well in a conservative and patriarchal setting, a woman who is impregnated out-of-wedlock has shamed her community, and effectively lost the ability to get married in the future and cannot financially support herself without help from a man’s breadwinning paycheck. That’s why.
It was not until I taught women whose lives had been scarred by genocide, did I understand the lasting effects of ethnic violence on a society. Teaching in a classroom of thirty students, and the majority of them had lost at least one immediate family member, if not both of their parents in the 1994 genocide, revealed to me the true definition of resiliency. Hearing the stories from my dear friend that he lost his mother to the genocide when he was just six years old, he the youngest of eleven brothers and sisters, had to live through genocidal violence as a toddler and then grow up without a mother and with a scarred father, leaves me aching and numb.
It is so easy to see only the differences between yourself and others, but once you start wandering and engaging with the beautiful people in our world, you begin to appreciate the differences rather than see them as obstacles; and you find that the similarities shine brighter than the differences ever could. Our common human needs for affection, nourishment, and shelter, make us equals as well as family.
Feeling the residual pain of my students and friends, but knowing that I could never understand the depths of their hurt, is when I feel most human. I could shelter myself from these feelings, either by remaining in my comfortable environment in the United States or by choosing not to engage with the local culture by surrounding myself with expatriates, but I choose to welcome the horror and the ecstasy equally. This is what being human is really about.
"So far this is the coolest travel story I have, but when you live in a world with such profound beauty and adventure, then you know that there is more to come. I welcome each and every one of these experiences!"
"I travel to expand my mind, to appreciate the diversity across human beings, and to understand the interconnectedness between humanity and the environment." |
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Breanna's Travel Story |
"The craziest, most thrilling, and wonderful travel day I have experienced thus far, was on my 24th birthday in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.
I woke up early that morning excited for the challenge ahead; I was attempting to summit Rwanda's third-highest mountain standing at 12,175 feet, the active volcano Bisoke. Leading up to the hike, I was feeling a wonderful combination of adrenaline and endorphins. My heart was full of love as a result of friends and family reaching out to wish me a happy birthday, and my body was ready to ride this high all the way up the mountain. However, as any mountain climber knows, what you expect to happen on the mountain never actually plays out the way you thought once you start climbing; hence the term adventure. After a bumpy ride up a dirt road in a 4-wheel drive jeep, my fellow adventurers and I arrived at the beginning of the trail. The landscape for the first twenty minutes of the hike looked like a scene straight out of Lord of the Rings, my comrades and I even began to sing the famous LOTR anthem as we strolled to the treeline at the base of the mountain. It was here where we met our group of ten Rwanda Patriotic Front military guards with AK 47s. If you have never hiked a mountain alongside automatic weaponry, or even been around an automatic weapon for more than 2 minutes, then you can understand the immediate tension at the sight and presence of such death machines. But as traveling teaches me again and again, you just have to go with the flow and find joy and humor in the new experience. On the surface, the guards are there to protect you from aggressive buffalo, and perhaps a pissed-off silverback gorilla; but dig a little deeper and you realize they are there to protect the valuable, tourist-attracting gorillas from poachers coming across the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Note Mt. Bisoke is half in Rwanda and half in the Congo. Once you begin hiking up the base of the mountain, you are literally in a jungle so thick that you can barely see ten feet in front of you sometimes. At this point, the trail also increases from a slight incline to a steep incline, and it remains at this steep incline until you reach the volcano summit three hours later. However, the punishing incline is not the greatest obstacle on the mountain, the weather and resulting trail conditions are. Ten minutes of climbing up the steep incline led us straight into a cloud, where it was extremely foggy (and scary eery) and spitting down rain. The three hour ascent up the mountain was done in freezing rain that caused the dirt trail to turn to slippery mud. For much of the hike, we had to decide whether to walk up a stream of water in a rock crevasse, or take our chances finding footing in the puddly mud. I chose the rock thus walking in water for most of the hike. In areas, mud mixed with the rock and stream to create a very unsafe walking situation. Our entourage was silent for much of the time, trying to focus on not slipping down the mountain. Every now and then we would yell out words of encouragement to one another, or indistinguishable hysterical screams of determination; the reactions varied. Finally, we were told that the summit was just 200 feet ahead and without thinking, I took off sprinting up the mountain. I had already been leading the group the last thirty minutes because I had decided that the birthday girl gets to summit first. However, my good German friend, Leo, decided he would also sprint resulting in a very intense race to the top while we both let out uncontrollable groans of pain. When the rest of the group arrived, the party started. One of the Rwandan hikers had carried a radio to the top, allowing us to get boogy-wit-it. I and another friend had brought a couple of beers that we thought would leisurely enjoy at the top of the Bisoke, while we baked in the sun and looked out over the lake in the crater of the volcano and into the Congo. In reality, it was 0 degrees Celsius, a cloud blocked our view of the lake, and we could not even decipher which direction the was the Congo; we were in the middle of a storm at 12,000 feet on top of a volcano. So, we decided to party in that storm. We danced our butts off, which simultaneously kept our blood rushing through our extremities, and we passed around the few beers to relax our bodies after what we had just put them through. The best way I can describe the situation is that there was a group of 15 hysterical people dancing in a storm; our bodies aching and cold, and our adrenaline through the roof. It was a magical twenty minutes on top of the mountain. Five minutes after beginning our descent down the mountain, the torturous cloud dissipated leaving the most incredible view I have ever witnessed. To our right was a close-by taller volcano, in front of us stood three more side by side volcanoes, and below us lay the valley of farms and an expansive lake in the distance. As we were still near the top of the mountain, we were finally able to see the incredible jungle from a birds-eye view. The thick trees and rolling hills was indescribably breathtaking. The fight up the mountain was over, we had earned this view. As we continued down the mountain, we began to slip, frequently. The trail had transformed into a liquefied mud substance and it was impossible to keep our footing. At first, we all fought it; doing everything in our power to remain upright. However, after two to three slips each, we decided to embrace the mud. A change in attitude brought a change in our perspective of the trail, it was now a mud slide aiding us down the mountain. With mud dripping off of every inch of our bodies, we sang Disney songs from the Lion King and laughed our asses off. Then, the most spectacular thing happened, I saw a silverback gorilla about 50 meters down the hill from us. I quieted my comrades and pointed the 200-kg gorilla out to them, and we stood watching the gorilla eat for the next half hour. It was both terrifying and humbling, and one of the most awe-inspiring experiences of my life. I thanked the universe there and then for such a wonderful birthday gift, but I also prayed that it would allow me to live past the moment; my life seemed so fragile in the presence of such a magnificent and strong creature. The rest of the way down the mountain was an endorphin-high blur. I could not stop smiling about how unique and amazing my first day as a 24 year old was, and I reflected on the highs and lows of the past 365 days. So far this is the coolest travel story I have, but when you live in a world with such profound beauty and adventure, then you know that there is more to come. I welcome each and every one of these experiences!" ~ Breanna Ribeiro |