Amy is in Las Galeras, a small fishing town on the northeast tip of the Dominican Republic. Power works half the time. Wi-Fi works half the time. Bachata works most of the time. She's been there two weeks, $10k into a 12 month long tour of the world brought on by a desire to learn Spanish.
She buys a cup of coffee. Ten pesos.
If you're me, you do the dumb thing. You convert it to dollars in your head — fifty cents — and you feel rich. You buy two more. You over-tip. You walk out of the café having paid local-times-three because the dollar conversion turned your brain off.
Amy doesn't do that. She does what she calls bus math.
Here's how it works. You land somewhere new. The first thing you find out is what a bus ride costs. Whatever that number is — that's your local dollar. In Las Galeras a bus is 5 pesos. So Amy's coffee isn't 50 cents. Coffee divided by bus is 10 over 5. Two. That coffee is two bucks to a local. Affordable, but not a steal. And a $80 excursion? In bus-math that's sixteen rides. That's expensive for a local. So she pushes back, or she finds a different way.
This is the part of her that I want every World Explorer Fund grantee to absorb before they get on the plane.
The grant is $10,000. We want it to carry a person for a year. On paper that sounds tight — $10k is gone in four months in California, and most kids applying to us are doing the dollar-conversion math in their head. They look at the grant and they hear short trip. Amy looked at $26k and heard short trip too. She was wrong by a factor of three. Not because she scrimped. Because she stopped translating into the wrong currency.
The bus-math is the trick if the pro traveller's tip to make that happen.
Amy picks a hobby first and a country second. She wanted to learn bachata, which originated in the Dominican Republic, so she came to the Dominican Republic. When she wanted salsa, she went to Puerto Rico. Bolivia, she didn't have an anchor for, and she said it cost her — she rushed, she sped, she came home not really sure what she'd seen. With bachata, she has a reason to walk into the same studio three times a week. She has a reason locals talk to her. She has community in two weeks instead of two years.
That's the difference between a tourist and an explorer. A tourist consumes a country. An explorer apprentices to one.
The other thing I want grantees to hear from her is the mom story.
Amy's parents are Chinese immigrants. She quit a video-game career at Amazon and Warner Brothers to do this — not exactly what hard working immigrant families from China want to hear. When she told her mom about the trip, her mom went quiet, kept cleaning the kitchen, didn't look at her. A week later her mom handed her a backpack. You're going to need this.
Then the day before Amy was going to put in her notice, she got cold feet. Called her mom. Said, I can't. And her mom said this:
"Amy, you have no idea how many people, the moment they get their first paycheck, let go of every passion, every dream, every hope they've ever had, because it's so comfortable. So if you still have a passion, I need you to protect it with everything you have."
That's the whole reason this fund exists. Finn was twenty when he died. He had passions and dreams and the cheek to chase them down. The World Explorer Fund is built so other twenty-year-olds don't trade those in for the comfortable paycheck before they've even tested what they were dreaming about. We hand the keys to unlock an unspoken dream, a plane ticket and we trust them to come back changed.
Amy is what coming back changed looks like, except she hasn't come back yet. She's still out there, doing bus-math in a fishing town, learning a dance from the people who invented it, watching a fisherman play footie at sundown and wondering why San Francisco told her she needed an AI billboard to feel productive.
The whole thing she said about that is worth quoting straight:
"Every mundane, boring life is beautiful if you choose to give it meaning."
If you're reading this and you've been quietly carrying a dream around — Amy's mom is right. Protect it. The bus-math will sort itself out once you're on the bus.