This was my second international trip with Habitat. In 2019 I was lucky enough to join Habitat Charlotte Region in Cambodia (photo, left). I knew going into this trip, just as I had my first, that it would be a life-altering experience, the kind of trip with the power to shake you to your core and leave a lasting imprint. But unlike last time, I was now privy to the fact that said imprint would come, in large part, from the other passengers in that van. Within minutes of our three-hour journey to San Miguel that morning, my back was to the window and I was deep in conversation with my friend Susan. We hadn’t seen each other since Cambodia so we spent most of the first leg of the trip catching each other up on all the unexpected twists and turns our lives had taken, as lives are wont to do, since 2019. As someone who loathes small talk, I find the instant intimacy of these trips to be a salve of sorts for the soul. Something about knowing you’re about to spend the next week getting back in that very van as the dirtiest and sweatiest version of yourself tends to fast track that in my experience.

“Which volcano is that?” Bex, our team leader, asked the Habitat El Salvador team with us in the van. I turned to look out the window at what she was pointing toward, that delicious, childlike feeling of awe rising in me like the majestic mountain in the distance. I have a lazy tendency to unfairly credit the mere act of travel with being the singular source of that warm, lava-like rush of wonder, as if ink left by a rubber stamp on the page of a government-issued booklet could possibly hold that kind of power. When international travel all but ceased several months after returning home from that Habitat build in Cambodia, it didn’t take me long to remember that the stage of life we most closely associate with wonder is, at least in my case, the one that involved the fewest passport stamps: childhood.

In the early days of those four years of dormancy between Habitat trips to Cambodia and El Salvador, I remembered a practice I picked up during the long van rides between where we were staying in Battambang, Cambodia’s second largest city, and our build site of writing down things I observed out the window. Rice drying on blue tarps in front of homes. Dogs riding on top of rice sacks piled high in the back of a truck bed. People texting while riding four-or-more deep on the back of motor bikes. Small children sleeping on the floor of a market. It didn’t matter where I was necessarily, what mattered was noticing the wonder and humanity within each of those tiny micro-moments of life passing by outside the window.

In those dark, early days of the pandemic I spent a lot of time scrolling through notes and photos of my time with Habitat in Cambodia on my phone, a window in and of itself, wondering and worrying about the people I’d met there just a few months earlier. How was the family we’d worked with faring? Was their small sky-blue home—the color they picked out for their new one-room structure made of brick, concrete and drywall with the metal roof we’d spent a week building with them in the sweltering heat—protecting them? One day I pulled out a notebook and started jotting down my observations for a few minutes each morning. It became a ritual that felt more like a magic trick at the time, instantly pulling me out of my head and back into the world I felt so cut off from, just as it had on those dusty rural roads outside Battambang.

In the van that day and for the next five days we had Bex, Crystal, Susan, Rick, Abdue, Alan, Malyn, Vince, Charlie and Patty* in town from Charlotte; Fred from Wilmington, NC; Beth and Gail from San Francisco; Flor, Francis, Vanessa and Magali from El Salvador; and myself from Washington, D.C. (*It’s important to note Patty is actually from El Salvador and worked with Habitat for many years there before moving to Charlotte, as I know all too well my new favorite surprise-song-loving Swiftie and karaoke-singer/performer will have something to say if I don’t drop everything now to clarify that.)

“How many of these trips have you been on?” I asked Crystal as we got out of the van to stretch our legs at a gas station. Nearby, a woman was selling water straight from coconuts and bright red lychees spilled out of plastic crates by the side of the road under a makeshift tarp tent. It’s a common question on the first day of a Habitat project, not because it’s a competition of who’s been on the most Habitat trips or builds, but because it’s an easy way to start connecting the dots between group members. Habitat volunteers weave this beautifully intricate web and I love little more than tracing each thread to uncover the expected and unexpected ties that bind and bring it all together. Crystal lives in Charlotte and works at the Habitat ReStore there, which is where my mother was volunteering when she signed the two of us up for the Cambodia trip that Bex also led in 2019. Alan, another Cambodia alum, volunteers there, too. Susan, who I gabbed with on the bus, met Gail, from San Francisco, on a flight years ago and that same gift of gab resulted in a new Habitat volunteer before their plane’s wheels touched the ground. Now Gail’s wife Beth trades her stethoscope for a shovel and joins her on trips. In other words, Habitat Charlotte Region can do in one or two what takes Kevin Bacon six.

Each morning for one week we piled in the van after breakfast and headed to the build site. We passed the shops, markets and restaurants opening up for the day. We went through the roundabout where there’d often be goats or cows grazing in the late afternoon. We looked out the windows and held our breath as we crossed the Río Grande de San Miguel to see the impact of the previous night’s downpours and tried to gauge how muddy our worksite would be that day, how much of the previous day’s work would be washed away, how many buckets of the heaviest, thickest muck imaginable we’d fill while forming a single-file line—lovingly called the bucket brigade—and passing them up one by one to be dumped off site. Rainy season on a construction site, nevermind one near the country’s most active volcano, proved quite the reminder of the impermanence of it all. But you’d never know it inside that joy-filled van full of boots caked in the previous day’s mud and laughter that only ever stopped for sleep (and pupusas).