After college, my friends and I might as well have crawled into a cannon that shot us out at varied trajectories and scattered us across the country from Minnesota all the way to east Michigan. Admittedly, many of us didn’t make it out of the Midwest, but it isn’t called flyover country for nothing – the Midwest is a formidable stretch of countryside to traverse, especially if you don’t have a reliable car. Like many…

The cockroaches crawling over the seats only marked the beginning of the twenty-plus hour hell about to commence. By the time the other students noticed the insects slowly emerging from the plush, reclining seats, it was too late to turn back. It was the summer after my freshman year of college, and I was in Indonesia with a professor and about fifteen students to interview government officials and NGO leaders about development of democracy and…