Outside of Ordinary: Women's Travel Stories

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

The editors wear many hats—Catherine Bancroft is a social activist and
Lynn Cecil is a writer and artist—and the contributors’ backgrounds
embrace the arts, social work, community development, religion, and
education. Together they offer an eclectic anthology that ranges from
Lorna Crozier’s 1986 take on Pinochet’s Chile, which includes some
poems, to Marion Jones’s lively tale of a study year in Shanghai where
she laughed a lot and learned the Buddhist term hulihutu—a state of
being torn “in fifteen different directions at once.”

For the contributors, there were challenges aplenty. Amanda Stevens
overcame her fear of hitchhiking in New Zealand, Anne M. Sasso went
around the world alone at the age of 22, and sarahmaya hamilton
discussed her two mothers and AIDS awareness with junior-high students
in Japan. A group of women over 50 cycled across the United States, a
mid-life chaplain trekked to the Everest Base Camp. One woman hiked in
the Andes with the chronic fatigue of fibromyalgia, another journeyed
through Spain with her mother.

As readers, we enter other worlds. We meet Quakers in the United
States, house builders in Papua New Guinea, refuseniks in 1970s Russia,
a Tibetan monk, an Afghan scribe, and hospital workers in Addis Ababa.
Carole TenBrink, divorced from a Vietnamese man, enjoyed a warm
friendship with a Vietnamese nun. On returning to the nunnery years
later, she was stunned to be offered a small shed for sale. Her
heart’s desire, a holiday retreat in her other world. Yet she did not
buy.

Several writers mention their discomfort in their travels. They tried
to help, to offer friendship, to live in the society that they visited,
but the barriers were there. Christine McKenzie, a student researcher in
Nicaragua, was welcomed and cared for by women neighbours; their
challenge of her youthful ideas led her to consider the latent
colonialism still persisting in much of the world. In her thoughtful
piece, McKenzie tells how a local woman burst into laughter at a title
in one of the research books: it read, “What do you know about my life
anyway?”