This article includes excerpts taken with permission from the book, Belonging to the World: A Journey from Grief to Connection in Every Country on Earth. By Barry Hoffner
When people hear that I’ve been to every country in the world, they usually ask the same question:
“But weren’t you afraid in some of those places?”
I get it. If your understanding of the world comes primarily from headlines, much of the globe looks like a map of threats, war zones, authoritarian regimes, famine, extremism. The news rarely leads with hospitality, kindness, or the feeling of being welcomed.
But after traveling to all 193 countries, including many labeled “high risk”, I’ve come to believe something that runs counter to the narrative we’re fed every day:
The world is far kinder than the headlines suggest. As I say in my book Belonging to the World, “I wish I had stories to tell of harrowing escapes. It might make my book more suspenseful. But I don’t.
I didn’t begin this journey to prove that point. I began it because my wife, Jackie, died in a tragic accident in Africa in late 2017. It was a rupture that was impossible to process.
At the start of our empty-nesting years, I found myself disoriented in a world that no longer felt like home. Travel had always shaped my identity. But after a period of deep grieving, it became my lifeline. Project 193, my quest to visit every country, started out in search of countries but what I found were people and their stories. And that is what healed me.
And what I found, over and over, was not danger, but the expansiveness of connection.
Iraq: Choosing Trust
I grew up in an Iraqi-Jewish family in California. My mother was born in Baghdad before her family left in the 1920s. For years, Iraq existed in my mind as memory and mythology, then as a battlefield shaped by war.
When I finally stood in Baghdad in mid 2022, I carried pride and unease in equal measure.
At a military checkpoint, an officer studied my passport and asked bluntly in Arabic:
“Are you Muslim?”
I paused. I could have deflected. Instead, I answered honestly:
“Ana yahud.” I am Jewish.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled.
“You are welcome in our country. It is your mother’s birthplace. It is yours too.”
He placed his hand over his heart.
In that small gesture, decades of inherited tension and one-sided narratives softened. The headlines had taught me to expect hostility. Instead, I found dignity, welcome and wonder.
Sudan: Grace Under Fire
When I arrived in Port Sudan, the country was in active conflict. Khartoum had descended into chaos. Millions were displaced. The crisis barely registered in global news cycles.
I met my guide Khalid, also a painter who fled the capital after soldiers ransacked his home and destroyed much of his work. I met my driver Ibrahim, who escaped with his pregnant wife as fighting closed in. They had traveled a long distance just for some work. There hadn’t been tourists in Sudan since the war began about a year earlier.
Their stories were brutal. Yet what struck me most was not despair. It was resilience.
At a UN refugee camp, women from Darfur stood in line for food under a punishing sun. They wore radiant gowns and brilliantly wrapped headscarves, posture straight, expressions calm. War had taken their homes. It had not taken their pride.
Headlines reduce Sudan to “civil war.” They don’t show you elegance in a ration line. They don’t show resilience as daily discipline nor dignity as a tool of survival.
Kindness, too, was present, in Khalid’s shy smile when I offered to buy one of his paintings for far more than he dared to ask, in the way both he and Ibrahim insisted on showing me a part of their country where bombs were not flying despite their own uncertainty.
Rwanda: Life After Horror
In Rwanda, I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial and confronted the scale of 1994, nearly a million murdered in one hundred days.
History there is not theoretical. It is visceral and heartbreaking.
Later, I visited my guide Obed’s home. He had survived those years as a child refugee. His daughter had been born days earlier. His wife placed the baby in my arms without hesitation.
As I held her, I was struck by the contrast, genocide and rebirth in the same narrative. Rwanda is often frozen in 1994 in Western imagination. But in living rooms across the country, families are raising children, building businesses, choosing coexistence over revenge. If you ask a Rwandan today whether they are Hutu or Tutsi, the answer often is “we are all Rwandan”.
Headlines remember catastrophe. They rarely follow the long, quiet work of healing.
Afghanistan: Beyond the Caricature
Traveling to Afghanistan a year after the Taliban retook control was not something I advertised casually.
At checkpoints outside Kabul, fighters stood with cigarettes in one hand and AK 47s in the other. Twelve months earlier, they had been at war with my country.
And yet, what I remember most are shopkeepers offering tea, children waving, guides navigating uncertainty with humor and pride.
Afghanistan’s political reality is complicated and still is tragic, particularly for the women who live there. But its people are not the caricatures implied by two decades of cable news. They are parents, students, merchants, navigating forces far larger than themselves. Trying to get by after years of war and a takeover by a group that denies basic rights to so many women.
Danger and humanity can coexist. The headlines rarely show how people continue to get by and survive.
The Koreas: Listening to the “Other”
In Seoul, I met Yuna, a female North Korean defector who escaped across the frozen Tumen River at eighteen.
We talked about propaganda, fear, and freedom. She said something that stayed with me:
“The world only hears about missiles and dictators. No one asks about my people’s dreams.”
North Korea is synonymous with one family and nuclear threats. But there are tens of thousands of defectors living elsewhere, carrying stories of longing, humor, love, and complicated nostalgia.
Headlines flatten nations into symbols. Conversation restores the humanness of people.
What Travel Taught Me About Belonging
After Jackie died, I feared that my life might feel permanently fractured. But then I started to travel. I will admit at first it was an escape, to avoid the memories of home.
But somewhere between checkpoints and classrooms, deserts and refugee camps, something shifted.
In Saudi Arabia, I danced salsa on the side of a highway with my travel mates who cheered me on. In Mauritania, a shepherd poured fresh camel milk into my morning coffee with a grin. In Lebanon, a refugee family insisted on making me a meal during Ramadan. In Pakistan, students challenged me on geopolitics, then asked for selfies.
These were not staged moments. These strangers were simply being kind. Connection was what they sought.
Travel did not convince me the world is safe in some naïve sense. I have seen devastation, corruption, injustice. And the suffering observed in many places is real. But cruelty was not the default that I saw in my travels, kindness was.
It showed up in a soldier’s hand over his heart. In a refugee mother offering tea. In a painter embarrassed to charge too much. In a classroom of boys asking, “What is the meaning of life?”
Visiting every country did not make me fearless. It made me less certain of simplistic narratives. I no longer see country names when I watch the news, I see faces. I see Khalid in Sudan, Obed in Rwanda, Yuna in Seoul, the officer in Baghdad.
Grief cracked something open in me. Travel filled that space, not with distraction, but with perspective. I stopped seeing “dangerous places.” I started seeing people trying to live with dignity under difficult circumstances. And I was captured by their stories.
The world is not gentle everywhere. It is not free of danger. But if you step beyond the headlines, if you sit at the table, drink the tea, attempt the language, answer honestly when asked who you are, you may discover what I did:
Not a world without suffering or danger. But a world beautifully human, and in that, for me, a sense of belonging.
