quincy6

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Worth a Story

This post was written by Quincy Godwin after his year as a Global Gap Year Fellow. 

Sometimes you tell a story that sucks.

It’s an inevitable scenario stimulated by the warm glow of a loose conversation that knows no boundaries: Everyone is sharing a time when the rain ruined their day. Some are funny, some are tragic, yours doesn’t quite connect.

It’s your turn to tell, but the anecdote that you’re thinking about doesn’t really fit the format of the other stories at all. The rain has never ruined your day. In truth, it’s embellished many of them; you love the smell that announces its arrival, you love the electricity that’s in the air, you love the way it feels on your skin and the way it makes the whole world stand still like Christmas lights strung around an intimate dark room.

But you can’t quite capture the words to describe all those […]

By |November 30th, 2016|Post Gap Year|
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How to Win Friends and Travel the World

by Not Dale Carnegie

Well pretty much the exact opposite of Dale Carnegie.

By an 18 year old kid traveling the world about as gracefully as a fish climbs a mountain – bravely (stupidly?) venturing where no fish, or any species this low in the course of evolution for that matter, has gone before. I’m probably learning some things a fish shouldn’t, like how to tie a bowline knot with my dorsal fin and flop up a boulder. I’m also probably missing some things going on back in the ocean. So why did I decide to climb this mountain, you ask? Well, for the halibut.

*EDITOR’S NOTE: Quincy – I swear to God…*

Discontinuing the fish-mountain metaphor from here on out (you’re welcome) my point is that I’m doing a strange thing at a very vulnerable time in my life – and I’m not exactly in my element.

But I’m killing it. […]

By |March 29th, 2016|Gappers in the Field|
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Laughter During My Gap Year So Far

by Quincy Godwin

They say what goes up must come down – my jokes disagree.

They never land.

*Confusion*

But even when the sun was blotted from the sky by the cloud of my unlanded jokes – soaring high over the heads of everyone who didn’t watch season 6 of It’s Always Sunny or doesn’t know who Joe Pesci is – my laughter still carried and my confidence in my delivery was never damaged.

Because every once in a while I got a couple of chuckles from the homies.

That was in America, though, where knowledge of trivia and references became necessities to salvage our minds from the boring lack of real problems to talk about. Then I left the States and the very few people that actually knew what the heck I was going on about were no longer there to guffaw for the Flawless Guffaw-less. (my nickname.)

At first I didn’t care. This didn’t […]

By |February 18th, 2016|Gappers in the Field|
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The Present Has My Name On It: Christmas in the Western Ghats

by Quincy Godwin

High school girls make me just as nervous outside of high school as they did in high school, maybe even more. I found out this weird personal fault through the unlikely circumstance of being the topic of discussion amongst a group of them.

Absurd – I know!

But to make this situation even more science-fictiony – they were from New Zealand! (Oh, and we were in a forest on the side of a mountain in the Western Ghats of India.)

How I found myself being roasted around a campfire in the woods like the marshmallow that I am by a dozen 16 year old girls, I can hardly explain. All I know is that I was graciously invited by Kalypso to accompany one of their tours through the Western Ghats as a part of my internship. I wish now to describe the experience I had.

At six in the morning, just […]

By |January 19th, 2016|Gappers in the Field|
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Shravankumar

by Quincy Godwin

Hinduism is a particularly charming way of explaining the way our heads are put together, and how our souls have found these bodies made of star corpses that we carry through the plane of existence with a ball of dirt as our vehicle and the cosmos our byway. Hindu’s are the essence of India, filling it with radical exhibits of life and accentuating its weirdness. I found a magnetism about this religion and the people who’ve laid it as the foundation of their days – it captivated me with its bold approach to benevolence. I found myself asking everyone with their 3rd eye marked about its history, testimonies, and anecdotes. As I found out more about it I found that the emphasis put on the importance of family within its philosophy has caused me to reexamine some things in my own life.

One story belonging to these that […]

By |January 19th, 2016|Gappers in the Field|
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Finding Home in Tanzania

She stops in the doorway of the kitchen and breathes in the familiar odor of cut carrots and friendly things. She sits down to her work with a smile supporting her sun-darkened cheeks, the pressure of her eagerness bursting within her pockets of happiness that gush over her parched spirit. Her callous hand, greasy with cooking oil, reaches straight into the frying pan to flip the sizzling meat, which has by now succeeded in smiting every nose and stomach in the house. Although cooking utensils litter the counter behind her she deems them unnecessary. I suppose that long ago she forsook the spatula as an artist forsakes his brush when he finds that he’s become the tool of his trade and to be more intimate with his passion he uses his own skin as the instrument for portraying his will. Fresh ingredients her palette, the stove her medium, and […]

By |January 11th, 2016|Gappers in the Field|
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Better than Freebird

by Quincy Godwin

If I awake before 8 am on a Saturday morning it usually means that I’m expecting an amusement park, a huge breakfast forged at the hand of a master (e.g. Dad), Dragonball reruns, or an equally pleasurable experience. Incredibly seldom is it that I will disturb myself from my bed for something as dismal as an academic assembly at such hours. So rare indeed that I can only recall three times that I have gone through a similar trouble in the past half a decade.

Once as a graduation marshal for the Hertford County High School graduating class of 2014 – once more as a graduate of the Hertford County High School graduating class of 2015 – and finally as an esteemed music teacher at Good Hope Primary School and Orphanage in the beautiful foreign country of Tanzania performing a critically acclaimed original song with the graduating 7th […]

By |November 2nd, 2015|Gappers in the Field|
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Three Perfect Hours: A Night of Tanzanian Reggae

by Quincy Godwin

Sometimes I find the things that actually happen to me a bit hard to believe. It’s pretty difficult to relay a course of events when the prose for such is too perfect, or similarly outlandish.

My life has become a thick stew of perfect and outlandish.

I feel like the little brother that rushes in mid-conversation to brag about a deed whose shimmering façade forsakes the truth of the effort, and who everyone disregards without grasping the weight of what was really accomplished.

Following the theme of disregard, I’ll disregard the skepticism that I assume is already crashing against whatever monitor that you’re viewing this blog on, with enough force to shatter it. Hopefully you have a screen protector because your doubt is unwarranted. This really happened, I promise, and if you don’t believe me then perhaps the photographic evidence can convince you.

Okay, I feel like that was a pretty […]

By |October 22nd, 2015|Gappers in the Field|
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