Traveling, like most other activities, really is contingent on how much work you put into it. Traveling passively is easy to do and essentially useless. You go somewhere else, rapidly seek out the things that make you comfortable, and then sit there bothered by how these approximations don't quite make you as comfortable as you would have been if you never left. You might go try the tourist gig a little, snap some pictures to prove to your friends and family you were wherever, and then go and hide some more.
It seems hyperbolic, but go to any practically and hostel in a developed city worldwide and you'll find a group of Americans doing just that (not to mention other debaucheries).
Traveling actively is basically the exact opposite of that. It takes research, bravery, spontaneity, social skill, and a boat load of curiosity. When you travel like this though you can paint yourself into entirely new environments and see the ways you expand, you can look back into the ways you live normally and then pick and choose the parts you like the most. In this way you can actively change your own world and certainly put yourself in a better place to continue making positive changes.
Most immediately: you'll soften your bias and become aware of the biases of others, you'll understand the traditions of your culture and be better able to interpret their necessity or value, you'll become experienced in some other culture able to interpret things through a slightly different point of view. Together these things can be used to vastly improve your home or can become skills to help you change the world.
Of course, if you want to travel and at that very moment do some active changing, you may want to try something like Peace Corps, Doctors/Engineers Without Borders, or other world health initiatives. You should be careful though because if you don't have the experience which can let you isolate your own cultural biases a little then you may get connected with some group which will inhibit your ability to learn. In my opinion, this is the trap which things like mission trips fall into and, as an effect, they may become some kind of mixture of harm and benefit.
It seems hyperbolic, but go to any practically and hostel in a developed city worldwide and you'll find a group of Americans doing just that (not to mention other debaucheries).
Traveling actively is basically the exact opposite of that. It takes research, bravery, spontaneity, social skill, and a boat load of curiosity. When you travel like this though you can paint yourself into entirely new environments and see the ways you expand, you can look back into the ways you live normally and then pick and choose the parts you like the most. In this way you can actively change your own world and certainly put yourself in a better place to continue making positive changes.
Most immediately: you'll soften your bias and become aware of the biases of others, you'll understand the traditions of your culture and be better able to interpret their necessity or value, you'll become experienced in some other culture able to interpret things through a slightly different point of view. Together these things can be used to vastly improve your home or can become skills to help you change the world.
Of course, if you want to travel and at that very moment do some active changing, you may want to try something like Peace Corps, Doctors/Engineers Without Borders, or other world health initiatives. You should be careful though because if you don't have the experience which can let you isolate your own cultural biases a little then you may get connected with some group which will inhibit your ability to learn. In my opinion, this is the trap which things like mission trips fall into and, as an effect, they may become some kind of mixture of harm and benefit.