Roseville, MN, USA

It's off to the doctor's office for an armful of medicine and a brainful of anxiety.

That night Anita and I got into a heated debate. Really. The doctor went through a litany of potential harms of traveling in East Asia -- the kids relay some of them in the video, but they couldn't keep up with the butcher's bill of hazards from nighttime mosquitos (malaria and japanese encephalitis), all-the-time moquitos (! denge fever), and the general warning not to operate motor vehicles at night. No wonder as a population so few of us hold passports (check out this story from Forbes celebrating that now a third of Americans possess passports although this "surge," such as it is, is largely due to increased requirements for travel to Canada and Mexico). Go to the Centers for Disease Control website is like opening a Pandora's box of suicidal mayhem (all the more so if you're inclined to check the box labeled "Traveling with Children").

I was asking, "Is there a better way to contextualize this material?" In the video our nurse, Mary, for example, pointed out you could die walking in the clinic's parking lot. Travel clinics use the tried-and-true tactics of driver's education movies to scare their patients into safer behaviors. Yes, but the subtext is, "Better to stay at home." My point was that people across Asia regularly face these obstacles. There are pharmacies and doctors. This is not terra incognita. Trust in the local people, was my argument.

But I hit a trigger. Anita took my concerns about how these threats were presented as being dismissive of the threats themselves. In fact, some might take the fact that I would consider going on such a trip at all as a nonchalant attitude toward the safety of my children. (That's a hook for comments, should the spirit move you.) She pointed out that the people most at risk when traveling to developing countries are immigrants who now live in North America or elsewhere in the developed world returning to visit family.

Of course there is truth in that, as well. And there is truth in the fact that we will get sick as sure as the sun rises -- the trick being to make sure it's not one of the nasty types that brings the excursion to a standstill or an early end. At the same time, I'm hoping there is a way to encourage us to go on these adventures, where the opportunity to learn something about our shared humanity and the distinctiveness of cultures provides a sufficient counter-weight to our homebody habits.

Many thanks to Mary, our nurse at the Travel Medicine Clinic who was game to be in our video blog. Thanks also to Darryl Harper, a dear friend from college and a great musician, for allowing us to use his groovy music from the Onus.