WE CAME,
WE SAW,
WE LEFT
A FAMILY GAP YEAR
Charles Wheelan
For Team Wheelan:
We did it, and it was great.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
CONTENTS
Trip Map
CHAPTER 1Lost in Medellín
CHAPTER 2What Were We Thinking?
CHAPTER 3The Long Farewell
CHAPTER 4If You Want Peace, You Won’t Get Justice
CHAPTER 5Into the Amazon
CHAPTER 6Things Go South in South America
CHAPTER 7Inspired by Real Events
CHAPTER 8To the End of the Earth (Almost)
CHAPTER 9Charlie’s Choice
CHAPTER 10The Left Side of the Road
CHAPTER 11The Exploding Penis
CHAPTER 12Do You Have What It Takes to Cross Four Lanes of Saigon Traffic?
CHAPTER 13Indian Bureaucracy 2, Wheelan Family 1
CHAPTER 14A Punjabi Shortcut
CHAPTER 15One Afternoon in Tanzania
CHAPTER 16Home Is Where Your Friends Are
CHAPTER 17Heading to Hanover
CHAPTER 18The Things We Learned
Epilogue: Where Are They Now?
Acknowledgments
WE CAME,
WE SAW,
WE LEFT
Chapter 1
Lost in Medellín
Could Katrina and CJ have been grabbed off a rowded metro train at rush hour? If so, how would I explain that to my mother?
TWO OF MY CHILDREN WERE MISSING. I was standing on a train platform in Medellín, barely ten days into a trip that would, in theory, take our family around the world. It had been over an hour since Katrina, eighteen, and CJ, thirteen, had disappeared into the rush-hour mayhem. Yes, Medellín, Colombia, the former seat of Pablo Escobar’s drug empire, one of the most violent places on the planet in the 1980s and ’90s. During that period, Colombia was a country where drug kingpins bribed compliant police officers and politicians and assassinated those who could not be bought.
It was a country where the narcos corrupted the state from within while guerrilla groups fought to overthrow the government—a simmering civil war that was funded by extortion, drug trafficking, and kidnapping.
Where children from wealthy families were snatched off school buses, taken deep into the jungle, and sometimes held for months until their families could scrape together the huge ransom.
Where so many people were kidnapped during the height of the violence that Colombia’s biggest radio station developed a program explicitly designed for kidnap victims and their families. Beginning at midnight on Saturdays, the show offered Colombians an opportunity to call in and broadcast messages to kidnapped relatives.
Yes, that Medellín.
Of course, by the time I found myself on a train platform in the fall of 2016, Colombia had transformed itself. The government and the leftwing FARC rebels, the biggest guerrilla group, had negotiated a peace deal that would soon be put to a public referendum. Pablo Escobar was dead. Violent crime had plummeted. But still: Where were my children? We had been separated at rush hour when we could not all squeeze on the same train. That was now feeling like a long time ago. Why were Katrina and CJ not texting me? What could go wrong for two American kids wandering lost in Medellín?
The rational part of my brain was saying: Not much. I work with data. I wrote a book on statistics. The real dangers in life for young people, in Medellín or New Hampshire, are motor vehicles and smoking and suicide and sun exposure. Getting kidnapped in Medellín in 2016 was more like a shark attack—a relatively improbable event that captures an undue amount of public attention. But I watch “Shark Week.” I’ve read about people who were struck by lightning twice. Unlikely events are unlikely—but they are also events, which means that they happen. As an hour drifted toward ninety minutes and Katrina and CJ had not turned up or texted, the rational part of my brain was losing out to the more imaginative side. I began thinking of the lottery slogan, “Someone’s gotta win, might as well be you,” only it was being twisted into, “Some people still get kidnapped, maybe it was them?” I was running out of alternative explanations for why two reasonably intelligent teens had not found a place with Wi-Fi from which they could contact my wife, Leah, or me.
As I waited idly and ineffectually on a train platform, making sure not to lose my own Wi-Fi connection, various scenarios began worming their way into my mind. Could Katrina and CJ have been grabbed off a crowded metro train at rush hour?
If so, how would I explain that to my mother?
Just a few weeks earlier, the Wheelans had set out on a “family gap year.” In fact, we would only be traveling for nine months, but why mess with a good slogan? The first stop on our adventure was Colombia. We had plans to continue traveling for another eight and a half months. My wife, Leah, and I had recently turned fifty. This was a midlife adventure, arguably more constructive than buying a sports car or having an affair. Thirty years earlier, after we had both graduated from college, we had set out on a similar adventure, traveling around the world from the fall of 1988 through the summer of 1989. That backpacking trip, which cost us each less than a Honda Civic, was the defining experience of our young adulthood. Now, having spent two decades living in Chicago and then a handful of years in New Hampshire, we were seeking to replicate our around-the-world experience, albeit with our teenage children.
So who are we? I am a professor of public policy at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Leah is also an educator; she was teaching math at a nearby high school. Katrina, our oldest daughter, was eighteen when we departed. She had graduated from high school the previous spring and had been accepted to Williams College. She deferred her admission, giving her a year during which she would be unencumbered by any formal responsibilities—a true gap year. Katrina is arguably the most intellectual member of our family. She once remarked in middle school, “I don’t know why anyone bothers to memorize the quadratic formula when it’s so easy to derive.” I nodded in bemused acknowledgment since I have no idea how to derive the quadratic formula.
For Katrina’s eighteenth birthday, Leah and I did not buy her a car, or a new phone, or Taylor Swift tickets. Rather, we arranged for her to have lunch with Esther Duflo, a famous MIT economist who has since won the Nobel Prize. Esther, as Katrina referred to her around the house, is a development economist, meaning that she works on issues related to global poverty. For a high school project, Katrina had studied one of Esther’s academic papers that explained how information flows through an Indian village. Katrina then “improved upon the model” (her words) to explain how gossip spreads through Hanover High School. I sent a random e-mail to Esther Duflo offering her a free meal in Cambridge if she would share a birthday lunch with a brainy eighteen-year-old. Esther was gracious enough to accept, and a month later Katrina and I met her at a French restaurant. Katrina and Esther talked about math, India, and development economics while I enjoyed pappardelle with asparagus and fresh peas.
The gap year adventure would give Katrina nine months to read extensively and pursue whatever interests captured her attention. We had no doubt that she would make the most of the time. For her part, Katrina was eager to explore the world, though not necessarily to spend 24/7 with the parental units. She would never use a phrase like “parental units.” Rather, it’s the kind of thing I would say, which would cause her to roll her eyes and walk away dismissively. Katrina’s plan was to leave us periodically to meet up with friends in different parts of the world. Roughly ten percent of the students in her graduating class were taking a gap year; many were planning to trav
el internationally.
Our son and youngest, CJ, was a rising eighth-grader. CJ had embraced the international trip enthusiastically, provided that he could still enter high school with his classmates. To make that happen, we would have to teach CJ the essentials of eighth grade during our travels: geometry, science, American history, and English, including one substantial research paper. The state of New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die”) is relatively permissive with regard to homeschooling. We would have to work with CJ regularly on the road, but it was not going to require a Herculean effort to get him promoted to high school.
CJ is an “exuberant child,” which is the euphemism one of his elementary school teachers came up with during parent-teacher conferences to describe the fact that he talks a lot. CJ talks so much that his friends in fourth grade began calling him “Wally.” Why did they call him Wally? Because when his teacher separated him from the class (for talking) and seated him facing a wall, his friends allege that he named the wall and began talking to it. CJ’s exuberance is bundled with the two most important attributes for any kind of adventure: a sense of wonder and a willingness to engage with anyone who happens to come along. At the beginning of the trip, I asked CJ to write down what he hoped to get out of our adventure. He wrote that he was looking forward to “experiencing diverse and incredible nature.” He mentioned the Great Barrier Reef in particular. In that same journal entry, CJ wrote, “There is really only one thing I’m concerned about. Myself. And, by that I mean controlling myself and trying to be less annoying. We are going to be spending nine months together.”
Our daughter Sophie, sixteen, was not with us in Colombia. This was not some kind of Home Alone– type accident in which we forgot her on the way to the airport. Sophie would be joining us later in the trip. She was the one member of the family who was not a huge fan of the family gap year. In general, Sophie likes good Wi-Fi, strong water pressure, and a dependable flush toilet. If she has to travel, she prefers the luxurious variety: grand hotels, fluffy bathrobes, mints on the pillows, that kind of thing. Sophie was also reluctant to miss her junior year of high school—not because it is the most important academic year for a college-bound student, but because she is a social child who likes to spend time with her friends. Also, as a varsity volleyball player, she did not want to miss the fall volleyball season. None of this was unreasonable. Of the five members of the immediate family, Sophie would sacrifice the most by being away for a long stretch, a cost that was compounded by the fact that she was the least excited about the adventure.
We had negotiated a deal in which Sophie would stay behind with my in-laws for two months—until the end of volleyball season—at which point she would meet us in Lima, Peru. Sophie is a good negotiator, in large part because she is the most stubborn member of the family. A defining moment of her childhood was an incident the family now refers to as “Bananagate.” Sophie was not a good eater as a child. In particular, Leah and I were constantly cajoling her to eat a healthier breakfast, or any breakfast at all. On one particular morning when Sophie was seven, I was walking her to school and I asked her what she had eaten for breakfast. “A banana,” Sophie answered too quickly. I was immediately skeptical. There were no bananas in the house, and I told Sophie as much.
Unfortunately, Sophie is not one to stop digging when she finds herself in a hole. Instead, she typically drives a backhoe into the small hole and works hard to make it deeper. Faced with an apparent lack of bananas in the house, Sophie explained with conviction that my mother had brought bananas on a recent visit. I knew this was implausible for all kinds of reasons, so I asked Sophie what she had done with the peel after she ate her banana. Sophie—now excavating with furious resolve—replied confidently, “I put it in the trash.”
After school drop-off, I returned home and checked the trash can. There was no banana peel. Obviously this conflict was no longer just about eating a healthy breakfast. When Sophie arrived home from school and I raised my banana-related suspicions, she urged me to check the garbage can again. There, resting atop the trash, was a banana peel. As we learned from Watergate, the cover-up is often worse than the crime, and Leah and I were nearly certain that a massive cover-up was under way. But we were not absolutely positive. Could I have missed the banana peel on my first search? Sophie was sticking by her story. We tried the good-cop approach, patiently explaining the virtues of telling the truth. Then we tried the bad-cop approach, describing the horrible things that happen to people who lie. Sophie did not budge. Worse, she explained tearfully how tormenting it was for her to tell the truth and not have her parents believe her. “What if you never believe me in my whole life!” the seven-year-old Sophie wailed.
Hours later, with the conflict still unresolved, I was lying on a couch in the living room reading a magazine. Sophie was sitting silently on the couch opposite me. Apropos of nothing, Sophie burst into tears and yelled, “I didn’t eat a banana!” She subsequently confessed to the cover-up as well. She had acquired a banana peel in the school lunchroom, carried it home, and laid it atop the trash.
Sophie’s relationship with the truth has improved steadily over the years. The underlying stubbornness has not changed much.
Meanwhile, we had picked up an additional child for the first several weeks of the trip: our niece Tess. When we first floated the gap year plan, my wife’s sister asked if Tess, thirteen, could travel with us for part of the South America leg. Tess was studying at a Spanish immersion school in Boulder, Colorado. What better way to immerse oneself in the Spanish language than to travel across South America? For Leah and me, taking along Tess required serious deliberation. We had to consider the dynamics of traveling with someone outside the immediate family and the responsibility of doing so. In the end, Tess joined our travel ensemble.
Thankfully Tess was standing next to me on the Medellín metro platform. That was the good news: At least I had not lost someone else’s child. I was really thinking that.
Our first week in Colombia had been wonderful. According to plan, we met Tess in Fort Lauderdale and flew to Cartagena, another city etched into my mind because of its role in the drug wars. Cartagena, just a two-hour flight from Florida, is where South America meets the Caribbean: impressive Spanish architecture; a hot, humid climate interrupted periodically by afternoon showers; and an absorbing history, including three centuries as one of the continent’s most active slave ports. We booked an affordable Airbnb apartment in the Getsemani neighborhood, a fun and vibrant area not far outside the walls of the old city.
We had a rigid daily budget for the trip. Cartagena was the first place it would be put to the test. Would our housing allowance be sufficient for us to stay someplace convenient, comfortable, and safe? We strongly preferred to be in a central location where we could walk or use public transit to get wherever we needed to go. We would endure hardship as necessary—that is part of having adventures in interesting places—but none of us was eager to be uncomfortable for nine months. Sophie was not the only member of the family with a preference for a decent shower and a working toilet.
The Cartagena apartment was encouraging on this front. Our budget allowed us a comfortable space with two bedrooms and airconditioning that worked mercifully well. We immediately set out wandering the colorful, narrow streets, where moss and flowers were crowding every available space, including the wrought-iron balconies hanging off the centuries-old buildings. The city was fun and beautiful and easy—but still, it was Cartagena, Colombia. My paranoia was inflamed on the second day when we arrived back at our apartment and my camera was gone. We were only days into the trip and already one of the most valuable things we had brought along was missing! I had a horrible feeling of disappointment and violation. Leah, stoic in most situations, was saddened as well. Our impression of Colombia had been so different than what we had expected. We were enjoying strolling the streets unmolested and without fearing for our safety. And now this.
Theft is a reality everywhere. In fact, I had been so
afraid of having my camera stolen in Cartagena that—now this was just a hazy memory—hadn’t I hidden the camera before we went out of the apartment? If that were true—yes, I definitely hid the camera—where exactly would I have put it so an intruder would not find it? Evidently a very good hiding place, because I was having trouble finding it myself. The whole family was enlisted in the search. I re-created my mindset: What would be the best place to hide a camera bag so an intruder would not find it? Sure enough, there in the back of a cupboard in our bedroom, hidden from view by several extra pillows, was my camera bag.
We are wanderers. We like museums and monuments, but they rarely make for a thrillingly memorable experience. We prefer to pick a destination or activity for the day—even something as mundane as buying an electrical adapter or mailing a letter—and then make that the adventure. Things happen along the way, especially food. Every street corner in Cartagena was packed with carts heaped with fruit, grilled meat, fried things, baked things, and grilled things with fried things on top. I was enamored of the orange juice vendors, who would load five or seven oranges into an ingeniously simple crushing machine (manual or electric). With a flick of the switch or a crank of the handle, the machine would smash the whole oranges and fresh juice would come dribbling out of a slot in the bottom. One of my first tasks each morning was to head out to buy fresh orange juice—even before I made coffee, which says a lot.
We soon discovered two street food favorites: the empanada lady and the avocado guy. Empanadas, little pockets of dough stuffed with cheese or meat and then fried, were for sale just about everywhere. CJ quickly pronounced that a woman with a stand several blocks from our apartment—a single chair and table—made the very best chicken empanadas in all of Cartagena. As we gained confidence in the city, and as CJ developed a serious but entirely affordable empanada habit, he implored us to let him go by himself to the empanada lady. We made him memorize the route through Cartagena’s mazelike streets: turn right out of the apartment, then left, then right, and she should be sitting in her chair on the left side of the street. CJ appreciated the independence; the rest of us enjoyed the paper bag full of fresh empanadas that he returned with.
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