Short Solo

To say the summer of 1994 had a dramatic impact on my world would be an understatement. I graduated high school and shortly afterwards began a relationship that would lead to marriage and children.

In June of 1994, I attended a graduation party that turned into a mass gathering of people around North America glued to the TV watching the same white Bronco drive the freeways of Los Angeles – towing a convoy of police.

Yet that wasn’t even the biggest thing that summer that was connecting people en mass.

The summer of 94’ marked huge worldwide technological advancements via the World Wide Web, as the internet continued its rapid growth in popularity and accessibility.

I can recall the giddiness using WebCrawler for a few minutes each week. I’d join a chat room in another city exotically named MonctonLocals or Edmonton4U.

Global Information and Travel

The internet shrank the world. Suddenly, distant countries were accessible beyond encyclopedias. I read foreign newspapers and learned about life far outside Canada.

But I learned even more from travelers I met at my first full-time jobs in retail—first at Sam the Cameraman, then at Black’s Photography.

I worked in the final days of mass 35mm film. Competing with Walmart and Superstore meant developing and printing the important vacation photos of some Winnipeg families.

Our policy required us to open every envelope and review each order to ensure quality. Those moments sparked conversations about far-off beaches, cities, and adventures.

Once, I handed a woman photos that clearly weren’t of her. One of many rolls of film highlighted her husband’s Hawaiian getaway featured a different woman.

She paid, furious, and left without sharing a single travel story. She likely hadn’t been on that trip.

Getting paid to glimpse at other people’s lives became my global education. Customers spoke casually about visiting 50 countries. Listening to them, I started building a bucket list of my own.

By New Year’s Eve 1996, I set a bold resolution: visit 30 countries in my lifetime. Back then, I imagined ticking them off on massive European bus tours—covering countless countries in weeks.

An Introduction to Mama Africa

I still remember my first Sunday shift alone at Black’s Photography. I was a bundle of nerves. The day before, a customer dropped off ten rolls of 35mm film due by 1 p.m., so I arrived more than two hours early to make sure I was ready.

Those rolls became one of the most vivid journeys of my earlier life. Frame by frame, I traveled through safari scenes with elephants and giraffes towering over a 4×4, then into the dense rainforests of Uganda on a chimpanzee trek.

When the customer returned, he eagerly shared the stories behind the images. He spoke of Uganda’s unpredictability, of Rwandan refugees, and of how the country became a base for the Rwandan Patriotic Front as exiled Tutsi returned home at the start of a civil war in the early 1990s.

Through his photos, I began to understand the deeper history behind April 7, 1994—the start of the Genocide against the Tutsi, which also claimed the lives of moderate Hutu.

The violence did not emerge in a vacuum. The Belgian’s may have colonized fewer places than the other European powers, but their treatment of the people of eastern Africa has been some of the worst atrocities of the last hundred plus years.

The apartheid discriminatory laws elevated the minority Tutsi over the Hutu majority through racialized pseudo-science and unequal legal systems.

What began as a nervous shift in a Winnipeg photo lab quietly opened a window into one of the most devastating chapters of modern history in some of the most beautiful countries of the world.

28, 29 & 30

Now that I’ve traveled alongside my kids and my partner on their journeys, I’m returning to where I’m at my best—solo on the road.

While my legs still carry me, I’m setting out again to finish the bucket list with the final three countries next month—Darwin willing.