REFLECTION: world traveler?

Woah, you traveled around the world! That's so awesome!  You must know so much about the world.


A thought came to mind today on the way to class. I may have thought that I was a world (or global) citizen because I was abroad for most of my life.  I was born in South Korea and left the country when I was six to settle in the Western world.  My family lived in England for three and a half years, and little did we know that we would go to Eastern Europe and settle in Romania for another four and a half.  After going back to Korea and waiting a year for our visa, we finally crossed the Pacific and landed in New Jersey.
When I tell people here about my adventurous past, most of them, if not all, look at me with envy.  They think that I have experienced the world, and some of them actually say it to my face.  I would like to take this time to disagree and say this to their faces, "No, I still don't know much about the world."
I understand that they may not mean what they say.  They already know the fact that the world consists of more than Europe, Asia, and the Americas.  What they may not know is what the world really consists of.  Three-fourths of the world is poor.  There's violence, poverty, and diseases everywhere.  The places where I lived certainly weren't poor; with the exception of Romania, the countries that I lived and visited were developed countries.  Romania was poor compared to most of Western Europe, but it was not even near the kind of poverty that most countries around the world face.  I merely got a glimpse of what poverty is like.  I bet a businessman traveled around the world more than I did, but that doesn't necessarily mean they know about the places they briefly stayed.  If you wanna meet someone that has real experience with the world, find a missionary.
There's still a lot for me to learn about the world, and I'm willing to do it even here in the US.  And so can you, or rather, you should.