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Erik: What have you found most rewarding about immersing yourself in foreign cultures through
traveling?
Courtney: You know, I will be with people who have had life experiences that I will
never be able to understand, I mean they were a child soldier at the age of fourteen, they
were kidnapped, they were this, I mean we have worked with people who have had incredible
hardship and at the same time they find humor in their life, they find love in their life,
they find, you know -- you find that people are open to you and wanting to learn from
you and genuinely, parents want a better life for their sons and daughters, like there's
commonalties among us all that, without sounding cheesy, they're very true and I think I've
also become very inspired by -- the sense that I feel like sometimes people in these
situations are happier than I find my friends back at home are, I mean everybody has their
own sets of worries, everybody has their own sets of challenges and they are all valid,
but I think that when you go particularly in the developing world and people are facing
life and death issues, I mean it's not 'I can't sleep so I need to take a pill' it's
like -- it's ***- AIDS it's famine, it's poverty, it's lack of access to clean water, I mean,
it's life and death situations... but they're not -- there's hope and there's humor and
there's love and there is a sense of humanity and community that I don't always feel like
I find here and I think that that to me is knowing that people are out there facing things
that I would never have been able to imagine ten years ago or even every year, I mean I
meet knew people, I just can't imagine their life but they are -- somehow there is optimism
and there is love and that sort of the human spirit can triumph.