Book in progress…
In A Passion for Adventure – My Journey from Backpacker to Give Backer, Tom O’Brien shares his travel adventures and experiences of learning from, and giving back to, local communities.
Tom’s physical journey leads him through an internal emotional journey of self-discovery. Through his travels, Tom learns:
- How the past influences the future
- Failure, if you let it, can lead to a new and better opportunity
- To find your way through life, follow your strengths
What starts as a three-week escape from the corporate grind, while on a cross-country motorcycle vacation in India, leads to travel adventures and cultural discoveries while solo biking, hiking and sailing throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
His Passion for Adventure journey begins with a crowd of onlookers watching him assemble his bike in the Manchester, England airport. They continue as he winds his way across five continents, and more than fifty countries.
Side excursions to the Soviet Union, where he makes animal balloons and buys ice cream for the KGB agents that follow his travel group’s every move, to China, where he stays with an ex-prisoner persecuted for being Catholic, provide a mix of cultural travel highlights for readers to enjoy.
Along the way, he crews for a briny sea captain who in a drunken stupor fantasizes the British Empire is still in existence. Later, in another alcohol fueled episode, the captain threatens to throw Tom overboard attached to a cement bucket, all the way to the bottom of the sea.
Trouble finds him on a trip to Iraq, that becomes an overnight rescue, as a surprise insurgence lights the sky. An approaching United Nations vehicle comes to his aid, and this lands him a few days in a Kurdish refugee camp, waiting for an opportunity to safely travel to Syria.
In a Mexican hostel, he befriends Cuban refugees, and journeys to Cuba, to deliver letters home. He is welcomed by families, in many neighborhoods. They are grateful for delivering news of loved ones alive and safe, in Mexico.
Throughout these journeys near and far, Tom becomes aware of the vast poverty and lack of education faced by most people around the world. Tom’s liberal upbringing – think the Kennedy’s minus the cash, compels him to redirect his energy from travel conquests, to third world country improvement projects.
While awaiting his Peace Corps assignment, he travels to Guatemala, where upon seeing the devastation of the forests, he works in cooperation with local farmers and non-profits, to build a core volunteer team of seventy visiting students and travelers. He designs tree seed packets and planting instructions in Spanish. Tom’s team distributes these, and with the cooperation of sixty seven nurseries, local farmers plant trees across the countryside, in an attempt to re-forest the barren land, that has been stripped of trees and shrubs to the point of making it non-productive to farm.
In the Peace Corps, he asks and receives one of the more difficult of assignments in Africa, Malawi. In this third world country, with fifth world infrastructure, Tom earns the respect of the locals by bringing a broken well to the attention of the government, gaining funds for the repair, and preventing further deaths of his students and villagers from drinking contaminated river water. He leaves his indelible mark on the country by building and staffing two high-school classrooms, to bring literacy and education to five hundred annually, of the poorest young adults in the nation, and the world.
At the end of his first year, he helps to create the country’s first mobile laboratory to provide a hands-on teaching experience for science students. It is adopted nation-wide, and applauded by the President and Board of Education. Tom is awarded a second-year assignment, reporting to the Board as the country’s head of Science Education.
It was the mid 1990’s, when Tom taught in Africa. The height of AIDS, without access to treatment. Some of his students died, and many more became orphans, having lost both parents, aunts and uncles to the disease. Wanting to help, Tom encourage the children to write about their experiences, how they felt, what they wished for and this collection of essays was used to fundraise over $12,000 for AIDS awareness. Tom left his mark on Malawi, and Malawians left their mark on Tom’s heart.
This book goes beyond backpacker-style world travel into a deeply humane approach to absorbing a country, it’s culture and customs, and leaving it a better place for having visited.
Where does one go after they have seen and done things so worthwhile? In this case, Tom chose teaching in the inner city of Chicago. He selected the most deserving school by finding a Chicago Public School with students in need, where he works to this day, to give back to others less fortunate.