Brianna- by Malcolm

Brianna, 19 years old and a sophomore at Eugene Lang, grew up in the affluent plains of Erie, PA. “It’s not what people would think it would be. There’s sailing, old men, the beach… it’s antique-y,” Brianna says that Erie is nice enough in the summer, and Hell in the winter, and treats her hometown with the same tepid pleasantness anyone might use for the place they had grown up. Erie was a town of moderation compared to some of the places she had been in her life so far.

For the past several years, Brianna has traveled to an unusually large number of countries for her age: The Dominican Republic, Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania. She listed countries that she had done humanitarian work for, in an apparently self-initiated fervor. “I had a passport before either of my parents,” she said, “neither of them had left the country before I had.” Getting out of the United States seems to have opened Brianna’s eyes; it’s not surprising why she may look at Pennsylvania like it’s a glass of milk.

In her first trip to The Dominican Republic, when she was only twelve years old, a man was murdered very close by to her compound. “There was a rotting body, the police didn’t care. He just stayed there until people from the village buried him on their own.” Living conditions in the Dominican Republic shocked Brianna, who said that, at the realization, she threw up on the side of the street. “The people aren’t stupid,” she says, “There’s just no way to educate.”

That first trip has seemed to send her packing to many different, new countries. But when I asked her where she will travel next, she didn’t have anywhere outside of the country in mind, “You don’t need to leave the country to see poverty.”