A dry windswept stretch of coast unfolds in front of the derelict Red Sea Diving Resort, a site made famous by a film of the same name. In the mid-1980s, Israeli Mossad agents used it as a secret base in the evacuation of Ethiopian Jewish refugees who were being persecuted.
Today, the wind blows through the rusted door frames. There is no glass in the windows. I am in Sudan, and I have now visited every country in the world.
Fewer than 500 people (including about 10 Australians) have had the privilege of doing this, according to NomadMania, a group that verifies people’s claims, including mine.
Visiting a country is not about ticking it off a list. It is about meeting people, sharing experiences and making friends across cultures and communities. It is a mindset as much as an activity. It is, above all, about a willingness to learn.
I have seen a lot in the years of visiting every country – things traumatic and things that made my soul soar. And I have learnt a lot. This is a small selection of what I experienced.
Working for the Red Cross in Rwanda in the 1990s, I had 3500 rotting corpses at my feet in a church outside Kigali. The smell has never left me. I saw scenes of devastation in the former Yugoslavia; the dead children remain burnt into my soul. I returned to Rwanda and Bosnia in 2016 to see a peace – if fragile – in both countries.
In 1999, I had the privilege of being part of the team that monitored the independence referendum in Timor-Leste, and later, I helped train officials to monitor their own elections. The president-designate, Xanana Gusmao, surprisingly turned up to one of my training sessions. He said to me: “Andrew, you are helping my country, so you don’t come to see me, I come to see you.” The man’s humility was inspiring.
From 2005 to 2008, I was in Pakistan, dealing with the emergency relief and recovery following the massive earthquake in Kashmir. I worked with a leader in the Pakistan army, Nadeem Ahmed, not something I would have expected when I did my own military training with the Australian army. Nadeem was the military co-ordinator for the relief effort and later head of the reconstruction. We developed a close relationship, like a “big brother, little brother”, through the shared experience of fighting a natural catastrophe. I stay in touch with him to this day.
In the Philippines, I ran a program using advanced DNA techniques to help children find their sex tourist fathers and gain the rights and support to which they are entitled.
In a central African country that shall remain nameless, I was contacted by the prime minister who asked me to “transfer some money” to his nephew in Italy. I kept giving excuses until I could get out of the country.
In Tuvalu, the country in the world perhaps most at risk of sea-level rise, I met a child whose life objective was to be “a climate warrior” to save her “mother”, Tuvalu.
In Saudi Arabia, I saw how fast and real the change is, and how genuinely excited young people, including women, are for the future there.
In North Korea, I was stunned by just how much a government can control the thinking of a population. Human beings can only have choice if they have two or more sources of competing information. In North Korea, people have only one source of information, and most believe, wrongly, that they live in a good country.
Surprisingly, though, North Korea was one of the easier countries to visit. On the other hand, two of the most difficult countries for me to visit were Nauru and Nicaragua.
In Libya, I met Hails Kennedy, a blind forty-something woman with alopecia. She is the first registered disabled female to visit every country. In many “difficult” countries, the frequent travellers I met most were female. It was they who taught me that “gender doesn’t prevent or restrict travel, mindset does”.
And then to Sudan, my last country to visit. About 20 years ago, I wrote an internal UNHCR document that recognised killing in the Sudanese region of Darfur as genocide. The killing continues today, and the number of deaths far exceed that of Gaza. In Sudan now, I think of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the massive protests supporting Palestinians, and I can’t help but wonder why it is that these black lives don’t matter enough to protest, too?
I have trauma from some of the things I have seen and experienced, particularly in the 1990s. But even though I have travelled to every corner of the world, I find an antidote to the trauma in a very Australian place. When I go to the MCG and watch up to 100,000 people enjoying a game, supporters all mixed together, I think of how lucky we are. This place helps me bury the worst of my memories.
Out of all the things I have learnt from visiting every country in the world, three things rise above all others.
Firstly, most people in the world want the same thing. They want a better future for their children. It’s just that often they have a different definition or idea of the word “better”.
Secondly, I learnt that one should never feel guilty about one’s privilege. Only feel guilty if you do nothing with it.
And thirdly, never assume the safety we have in Australia will remain. We must be constantly vigilant to protect what makes us great – both tolerance and multiculturalism. Our strength and culture is being tested now.
Andrew MacLeod is a former high-level United Nations official, a former CEO of the Committee for Melbourne, and founder of anti-child abuse charity Hear Their Cries.
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Andrew MacLeod is a former high-level UN official and former CEO of Committee for Melbourne and founder of anti child abuse charity Hear Their Cries.