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Stroke Trek - Chapter 1
Greg's Journey Begins
June 2000
"I will live vicariously through you," were the words I heard from friends and acquaintances in July of 1998. I was about to begin a journey that would last close to six months and take to me places on this globe I had only read about in newspapers and textbooks. Places I had only seen in movies and on television. Places like Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Nepal, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey. Places in this world that, in my mind, would allow me to experience and observe people, cultures and beliefs so incredibly opposite from my 28 years of life in the United States. I realized that the time had come for me to go out and see the world.
Almost two years have passed since that trip, and not a minute has gone by when I haven't thought about a person or a conversation I had during those months. Not a day has gone by when I haven't pictured a sight in my head or felt a sensation in my body that I experienced during those months. And not a day has gone by when I haven't wished to be back out there, exploring more of this world while meeting the people who inhabit it.
It is now the first Spring of a new millenium and, yes, I am about to leave again. My name is Greg Constantine and I would like to share parts of this next journey with you. Why you might ask? Let me go back to the trip in 1998. After cashing in my 401K retirement plan, I set out to place myself in the most foreign environments I could think of. Environments that would, in many ways, force me to become vulnerable to the people and the cultures of the places I traveled. And the outcome was not only educational, it was enlightening in many ways. Many of my experiences were so foreign I will always find them impossible to describe accurately. But one was not so incredibly foreign. It was actually incredibly familiar. Familiar to the extent that it has become one of the reasons why I have decided to go on this next journey.
In 1986, my father, who was in his mid-forties at the time, had a massive stroke, disabling his right side and leaving him unable to speak or communicate in a normal capacity. Since 1986, I have seen hundreds of men and women walking in the shopping malls or down the streets of New York City, where I am living before leaving on my journey, all with the same physical characteristics as my father.
But it wasn't until I noticed these same characteristics on men and women in the streets of Phnom Pehn, Cambodia or Varanasi, India or Damascus, Syria or Aswan, Egypt when I realized that strokes disable people all over the world. Strokes happen everywhere, to everyone, yet it seems people rarely hear anything about them. Yes, the comment, "So and so had a stroke," comes up in the news or in conversation, but do people really know what a stroke survivor and their family go through once a stroke has permanently entered into their lives? How do people in poorer, less medically developed societies adjust to the impacts of a stroke within their family? Basically, how do people, from all over the world, deal and live with the disabling outcomes resulted from a stroke?
These are some of the questions I want to answer while on this next journey, and I would like to share them with you. In the last year and a half, I have saved up enough money to come closer to one of my own personal goals, which is to travel the seven continents. And during this journey, starting May 13, 2000, I want to talk to, meet with, observe, write about and photograph the stories of stroke survivors along my path of travel-in an effort to contribute awareness to something that has not only affected my life, but has affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
During the coming months I will be writing and sending, either via email or snail mail, stories to the staff at SAFE about stroke survivors around the world. In turn SAFE will be posting these stories on the SAFE web site for all of you to read and follow as I travel to places that I will not reveal at this time. So take out your atlases and travel with me around the world. I hope you enjoy.
Sincerely,
Greg Constantine
©Greg Constantine, available at www.strokesafe.org with the author's permission. For inquiries or reprint permission, contact gregc@strokesafe.org.
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