Introducing the Global Local…
New year, new beginnings
Hi friends,
Happy new year <3 And thank you for sticking around for six+ months of Z Tries. I want to take a moment to reflect on what this of exploration season has given me, as well as where it’s pointing me next.
The last 6 months:
Since last June, I’ve had the privilege of:
Serving as a camp counselor at Camp HEAL Palestine
Spending time in northern Kenya with USEC, a refugee-led organization serving Kakuma Refugee Camp
Facilitating a summer camp in Kenya for youth from around the world to connect with each other
Shadowing a historian in Bosnia & Herzegovina
Becoming a nationally-certified EMT (I’m currently completing ride-alongs on ambulances and med-evac flights—more reflections on this soon)
Helping refresh the strategy for a program conducting intergenerational travel programs to geographies with profound Islamic heritage (e.g., East Africa and South Asia)
Starting Rooted Routes, LLC as a home for my ongoing consulting and community work (entirely pro bono so far, but built with intention to expand into serving small businesses and community movers & shakers)
Most recently, living and working on an Indigenous hostel and farm in Ecuador, learning about plants, techniques, traditions, and more — reflection on this experience coming soon!
On paper, these experiences may look fragmented. To me, however, these experiences have helped reinforce the same lessons.
What I’ve learned
Despite my best attempts to be “settled”, to root myself in Boston, to build a stable and legible life, I feel most like myself when I’m moving. Not as an escape, and not just for the sake of novelty, but rather, moving as a way of learning how people care, live, organize, and thrive, and what patterns exist across artificial state borders.
I believe it feels most familiar because I grew up this way, living in four countries on two continents before I turned fifteen. And while I’ve absolutely traveled in the past to run away from things (or maybe myself?), this chapter feels different. Since stepping off the career ladder, I feel called to specific communities to learn skills, histories, and ways of being that were notably absent from my daily life in corporate America. I feel a longing for the sensation that was so often present in my childhood — the nervousness and excitement of approaching a new classmate at a new school, the curiosity and desire to understand how they navigated the environment we shared, that they knew so much more deeply than I.
What I’ve also found the words to express, uncomfortably, is how extractive my former version of “traveling for work” was. I always felt the cognitive dissonance, but I lacked the time and the space to reflect on the harm I was bringing to a world I love so deeply.
When I worked in travel and tourism consulting:
My long-term lodging options were dictated by negotiated corporate hotel rates (often with chains profiting from ecological destruction)
My meals were room service or delivery of American food chains through Uber Eats (a company deeply entangled with militarization and imperialism)
I could spend months in a city without ever knowing about the people hosting me, or whose land I was visiting
I was moving constantly, taking what I wanted, yet learning and sharing very little with my local hosting communities. What I did give in skills, time, and knowledge was reserved for the corporate and government institutions that were my clients.
Travel is political
All of the time I have spent moving, and the time I spent helping commercial airlines move people from place to place, has made one thing abundantly clear to me: travel is extremely political.
Who gets to move freely is determined by an arbitrary birth lottery. Where tourism flows is shaped by centuries of propaganda, colonialism, and economic disenfranchisement. And where our money goes, hotels, airlines, food systems, platforms, either reinforces or resists extractive power.
Why is Western Europe seen by so many as the default destination to understand modern history, while Iraq, home to Babylon, the cradle of modern civilization, is deemed unknowable and unsafe?
In a world with so much entrenched power, being intentional about where and how we move is one of the few forms of agency many of us still have.
So in this next phase of my life, I’ve been prioritizing slow, intentional travel, only to places where I’m invited: to learn, to serve others, or to build relationships.
And just as importantly, places where I am invited to ask myself hard questions.
What can I give to a place, not just take from it?
What do I leave behind in terms of relationships, resources, skills, memory?
Where does my money go, and who or what does it support?
What is my environmental footprint on the land hosting me?
And what do I carry forward in terms of stories, lessons, and practices, to share with others I consider my community?
What’s next: The Global Local
Despite all its harms, the internet is still one of the most powerful tools we have to democratize knowledge and center individual stories over institutional narratives. This belief is what brings me to The Global Local.
The Global Local is my humble offer to a world that is, by design, increasingly polarized, isolated, and consumeristic, due to weaponized disinformation and hollow incentives.
Through this platform, I’ll be sharing field notes from my journey in seeking out people and communities who build what they need to care for one another, often outside of corporate, governmental, and bureaucratic institutions.
You can expect reflections on slower, more intentional travel, skills exchange, mutual aid, indigenous knowledge and land-based wisdom, and what it means to be in relationship with the places we are, at home and abroad.
I will still be publishing longer, more personal reflections about once a month here on Z Tries. The Global Local, however, will host shorter, more frequent notes: learnings, questions, interviews with my hosts, and stories in motion. It will begin as a Substack, Instagram, and TikTok. My hope is that it grows into something self-sustaining: a platform for community building, skill exchange, and story sharing across borders — and outside of corporate and institutional interests.
Why this matters to me (and hopefully to you)
This project fulfills something I’ve been circling for years: a way to be in relationship with the world without consuming it.
To learn how to be in community with a place, not just pass through it. To move with humility and intention to listen. To share what I have to offer, not for incentives, but in reciprocity.
As always, thank you for being my community, for reading, and for coming along as I continue to figure this out in public. If you’re interested in engaging more:
Subscribe The Global Local on Substack
Leave a comment here to share your thoughts and advice on this new chapter!
With love and new beginnings,
Z
