Gwendolyn Sobkowiak | staff writer

I would live out of my backpack if I could. My family is from Pittsburgh but we didn’t really spend too much time here, when I was growing up. We were always out of town, traveling for my mom’s business. I caught the travel bug when I was 2 years old, thanks to her.

Before I was born, my parents lived in Monteverede, Costa Rica. They had gone there from Pittsburgh on their honeymoon and fell in love with it. Monteverede is a beautiful cloud forest, a type of rainforest that — due to its elevation — spends most of the year covered in a layer of fog so thick it looks like clouds. It’s famous for its unique wildlife and canopy ziplining, but at the time the population was relatively small and made up largely of a rag-tag assortment of Ticos (local Costa Ricans), American Quakers and field biologists.

Opportunities for Tica women to work were scarce, and as my mom befriended and became a closer part of the community she saw the need for social change. Women largely had the option of being stay-at-home wives, fully dependent on their husband or taking on cleaning and nannying jobs for wealthy families.

My mom decided to start a fair trade business that allowed for women to have their own stream of income, while getting to spend time with their friends outside of the confinement of their homes. The women in the project made jewelry from cloud forest seeds, sewed and embroidered detailed bird species on field guide bags for ornithologists and got to spend time sitting in a circle chatting with their friends and sharing homemade limeade.

In the early years of the project, my parents expanded the business to include ceramic artisans in Nicaragua, the country bordering Costa Rica to the north and the second poorest country in the Americas. They sold the products in the U.S. to local birding supply stores, at craft shows and to a handful of fair trade stores across the country.

Owing to this, most weekends of my early childhood found my older sister and me sitting in the backseat of my parents’ Honda, boxes of “Nene” seed earrings and luminaries decorated with the “tree of life” stacked in the middle seat and around our feet. We called these business excursions family road trips. We got to stay at a cheap hotel, swim in a pool and occasionally eat an orange creamsicle flavored yogurt if we were lucky. It was a real weekend getaway. We spent a lot of time seeing new cities, standing behind little plastic folding tables on college campuses (including Duquesne) talking about equitable pay and sustainable products. I loved it.

Besides our roadtrips, we visited Costa Rica and Nicaragua a lot. They were work trips, which meant the main focus was checking in on the artisans and seeing family friends. My sister and I hung around the artisans’ yards while my parents talked business, reading Goosebumps books, playing with their kids and visiting the local neighborhood store to buy mango-flavored popsicles.

Our travel experience made my sister and I little anomalies. We both had platinum blonde hair at the time and spoke rapid, jabbering Spanish with a Costa Rican accent (yes, true to form, I use usted for everyone). I had no interest in Pittsburgh, although I held no disdain for it, but I dreamed of seeing every country before the age of 50.

Traveling offered me an adrenaline rush which little else could.

Everywhere I went, the world offered me a new set of things to take in. Costa Rica was full of wildlife and the opportunity for forest exploration. My family took night hikes to see tarantulas, fed banana slices on a yard stick to the capuchin monkeys that banged on our tin roof in the afternoons and watched pizotes greedily scarf up discarded maracuya guts from our compost piles. Nicaragua offered new playmates, kids my age who worked with me to create imaginary cities out of plastic cups on the dirt floors of their living rooms. I loved how it seemed like everyone hugged in these countries, how the music was happy and fast and how the fresh fruit was in endless abundance.

I loved my family road trips, too. Traveling the country gave me a similar feeling of joy. Many times we went camping, venturing across the states with our little tents and hammocks. I loved that even the trees could look different if you drove far enough, how peoples voices changed along with their clothes.

I’ve been lucky enough to have visited 19 countries so far. My family works hard, but my mom set us up a long time ago by creating a business that afforded us an excuse to travel. We’ve stayed at many a tiny hostel, with all four of us crammed into a bed and spent our time walking almost everywhere instead of hailing cabs.

None of it bothered me. I might have complained all the times that the nighttime weather hit 100 degrees and we had to lay on the sticky tile floor to cool down, but I never really meant it. Everything outside of Pittsburgh had a gloss to it that made even the most inconvenient of situations forgivable. No amount of scorpions on my bedroom ceiling, pit toilets or 18-hour car rides could deter me.

In college now, I feel the same way. I’ve come to appreciate Pittsburgh more, for its familiar side streets and haunts. Almost my entire extended family is here, which is a real plus. My best friends live here and it boasts my favorite hammocking spot, but I don’t think I’ll ever be rid of the travel bug.

There’s something about carefully laying out your clothing, deciding which thrifted tank top is going to last you the voyage, what pair of hand-me-down shorts could be sacrificed to make space for a bag of Palitos scooped at the San Jose International Airport, what novel would make the best trade with a new friend. It all makes me smile even just thinking about it. The feeling of talking to someone who’s only ever seen the opposite side of the world as you, making lists and lists of new movies, books and songs that you’ve been shown, learning all the local legends that are bound to keep you up at night, it’s all unmatched.

The world is actually full of lots of good and interesting people. There seems to be an endless supply of neat trees that boast different flavors of fruits if you go looking for them. Yes, there are just as many bad, scary, horrible things as there are in Pittsburgh. But I love my birthplace and my planet all the same.

If you get down to it, I’m just as I was at 6 years old. My green hiking backpack on my lap, looking out a window, hoping for some new, strange little adventure.

Gwendolyn Sobkowiak can be reached at sobkowiakg@duq.edu