We have joined Servas International, a worldwide cultural exchange network in which members host international travelers in their homes for a few days at a time without accepting payment. The mission of the organization is to “build understanding, tolerance, mutual respect, and world peace” by “encouraging individual person-to-person contacts.” Our experience has been discovering things we had no idea we would encounter when we set out, but we are incredibly grateful for. We arrived in Sydney, Australia with essentially no itinerary at all. Many people aboard the ship to Antarctica asked us where we planned to go in Australia and what we planned to do. Sheepishly, we had to say we really didn’t know. We would just see what happened. Our Servas hosts were the key. We contacted a Servas family living near Townsville on coast in Queensland and stayed with them three nights. Leigh and Geoff built their home on fifty acres of bushland.

They have kangaroos, wallabies and bettongs coming up to the house every day looking for hand-outs. A wallaby looks like a small kangaroo. We watched a pair of male agile wallabies engaged in what looked like a boxing match. It seemed an important part of the ritual was stopping occasionally to take a good scratch.

Leigh has a friend Margaret in Townsville who devotes herself to rescuing kangaroo, wallaby and echidna babies whose mothers have been killed, usually the result of being hit by cars on the highway. When babies are discovered in the pouches of their injured or killed mothers, Margarat adopts them, feeds them, nurtures them and trains them to survive in the wild on their own. We had a chance to visit Margaret and hold the babies. Remarkable!

On the evening of the second day of our stay, Leigh invited us to attend Happy Feat, a dance program that she designed for people with special needs. This too was a wonderful experience, one for which we had absolutely no expectations. We had a blast.