The World Is Kinder Than the Headlines: How Visiting Every Country Healed My Grief

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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

I remember the exact day I decided to write a book as clearly as the moment I fell in love with my late wife, Jackie, and the days my boys were born. It was after a trip to Afghanistan.

It was early October 2022, nearly five years after I lost Jackie, and about a year into my journey to visit every country in the world. My travels were revealing a world far less dangerous than the headlines suggest. 

That journey began with a phone call, a year earlier, during COVID with a young Spaniard named Álvaro. After traveling to every country on Earth, he launched Wander Expeditions, bringing small groups to lesser-traveled places and, in the process, creating something rare: long-term travel families.

The idea of being with like-minded wanderers spoke to me, even if some were decades younger than I was.

Yes, travel was an escape from a house full of memories. I knew I could not dwell on loss while moving through places that felt exotic yet still “safe”—Uganda, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, countries unlikely to alarm anyone reading the news. I had set out in search of countries, but what I found were people and with that I found myself healing.

But if I was truly going to visit every country, I would eventually have to go where I’d been warned not to.

I chose Iraq.

For many Americans, Baghdad exists only in headlines—war, occupation, devastation. For me, it was personal. My mother was born there. Though her Iraqi-Jewish family left when she was young, I carried that lineage with pride and the deep desire to go there.

On my first evening in Baghdad, I sat in a café drinking strong black coffee, watching the city move around me. It was unfamiliar, yes—but I felt calm. Safe. At peace. I thought about the many conversations Jackie and I’d had about my dream of visiting my mother’s birthplace. If only she could see me now.

Traveling south toward Najaf and Karbala, my guide and I were stopped at a checkpoint. A soldier glanced at my passport.

“You’re American,” he said, motioning me into a small office.

Inside, an officer studied me. “Why are you in Iraq?” he asked in Arabic. “And why do you speak some Arabic?”

“My mother was born in Baghdad.”

“Are you Muslim or Christian?”

“I’m Jewish.”

He paused. Then he smiled.

“You’re welcome here,” he said. “This is your mother’s country. That makes it yours too.”

He walked me back to the car, shook my hand, and pressed his palm to his heart.

I had placed my faith in humanity—and it answered.

From Iraq, I travelled to Lebanon, a country in deep crisis and constant negative press. And yet there was the Mediterranean coastline, snow-capped mountains, Roman ruins, and food and wine I still dream about.

After visiting Baalbek, my guide asked if we could stop to buy bread from a Syrian refugee family in the Bekaa Valley. Though it was Ramadan, the matriarch, Aisha, insisted on cooking us lunch. She shared her family’s story—displacement, endurance, and dignity.

That evening in Beirut, on my 62nd birthday, sitting in a restaurant over a glass of velvety Cinsault, something crystallized. I wasn’t just visiting countries—I was engaging with people. Again and again, I found that the kindness of strangers seemed disproportionate to the hardships of the places they lived. With every conversation, the assumptions I carried began to fall away.

Somewhere along the journey, a deeper shift had taken place. I was no longer simply travelling; I was living again—learning, listening, gathering stories that reshaped me from within.

And then came the opportunity to go with Wander Expeditions to Afghanistan.

Less than a year after the Taliban returned to power, I wondered if I had finally gone too far. But the truth was simpler: I wasn’t just saying yes to Afghanistan. I was saying yes to life—and to the belief that most people, almost everywhere, want the same things.

Everything I had heard, read, and absorbed over two decades of war told me I should be terrified of the Taliban. Yet when I caught sight of them at checkpoints through the front seat passenger window of the 4×4 I was in, I wasn’t the least bit afraid. The landscape felt too foreign, too fascinating, too surreal for fear to take hold. Instead, I felt an unexpected excitement, which unsettled me given the abuses inflicted on so many people.

Each country I was traveling to, even Iraq and Afghanistan, stripped away an old fear: fear of danger, fear of solitude, fear of the “other.” Even fear of a life without Jackie—a life I had never planned for.

In that clarity, I understood I needed to write a book, not a travelogue, but a story about healing the heart through encounters with the world and its people.

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