Some of them are not so far away-you are more aware of where they are than I am. But you are invited to go not as tourists but as pilgrims. Tourists usually take with them a secure environment of guides, controlled space, little if any exposure to strangers, and as many amenities of the Me First World as they can stuff into their luggage. They do not go to learn but to be diverted or amused. But pilgrimage is a form of spiritual adventure with an outward turning of the spirit.
Pilgrims come with humility, as much to be helped and healed as to be helpers and healers.
A pilgrim wants to meet his brothers and sisters, learn their language, and their customs, eat their food, to sing, dance, and pray with them, and to join them in the struggle for a life increasingly more human and more just. A tourist will find Nicaragua a hopeless case, and practically every other of the left-out nations, the leftout neighborhoods. But to a pilgrim, wherever there is a struggle for justice, there is a Holy Land-una Tierra Santa.