MAGAN'S WORLD:RECENTLY, WHILE doing interviews for my book about a journey I made through Africa 18 years ago, I've been asked where my interest in travel came from. At first I thought there was no single factor I could point to: no intrepid explorers are hiding in the family closet. I come from a line of fervent revolutionaries on one side and placid dairy farmers on the other.
My revolutionary relations made occasional gun-running trips to Europe and fund-raising tours of the US, and they proudly traced their lineage back to a nomadic Gaelic poet of the 17th century, but other than that we were relatively sedentary.
So until April of this year I would have said there was no obvious motivating factor for my wanderlust, but then something weird happened at Cúirt International Festival of Literature, in Galway. I was due to give a reading from my book on India. While glancing through the festival brochure I noticed that in the same venue, at the same time, the day before me, was the US academic Samantha Power, senior foreign-policy adviser to Senator Barack Obama until she made a remark about the monstrousness of Hillary Clinton. The brochure listed her as Pulitzer-winning journalist and professor of practice of global leadership and public policy at Harvard, and when I Googled her I found she was educated in Dublin until the age of nine.
I stared hard at the screen and gulped. My very best friend between the ages of four and eight at Mount Anville Montessori School, at the Sacred Heart convent in Dublin, had been called Samantha Power. We had spent every free moment together, gossiping and playing make-believe in our den under a bush beside the tennis courts.
The photograph of her in the brochure had the same long red hair and freckles. It had to be her. I found that she had spent the intervening years wandering the world's war zones: Bosnia, Serbia, Sudan, Armenia, Kosovo. In one interview she even said: "If you really want to know how I got interested in war zones you'd have to go back to that first day of school in the Mount Anville uniform."
That got me thinking. Was there something in the air at Mount Anville that had set us off wandering? The writer Kate O'Brien maintained that convents were the most international of places, with sister houses all over the world, constantly passing missives and directives back and forth, and frequently housing nuns from far-flung destinations.
The founder of the Society of the Sacred Heart, Madeleine Sophie Barat, had established 99 communities throughout Europe, America and Africa by the time of her death, in 1865. In comparison to hers my life has been positively parochial.
When I attended Mount Anville the Sacred Heart had schools around the world. The nuns had acquaintances in many of them. I remember one showing me a pieta carved from a tropical nut that she had been given by a Salvadorean friend. It seemed impossibly exotic.
It's hard to pinpoint what exactly sets one off wandering. The writer Bruce Chatwin talked of a cellular impulse deep within us from our nomadic ancestry. My life of self-absorbed nomadism, interspersed with occasional efforts to document what I see in books and documentaries, can hardly be equated to Power's agenda-setting exploration of genocide, tribal conflict and Aids in developing countries. Yet it's worth asking whether the pervasive sense of weltanschauung and internationalism picked up from a convent preschool education might have played a part in focusing our gaze beyond the insularity of 1970s Ireland.