It’s a tired saying.
We wait all week for Friday, wait all month for pay day, wait all year for December . . . always postponing our joy and plans to a more convenient future date that virtually does not exist.
This 37-year-old opted to no longer delay her happiness.
It was 2016 and Jessica had just read an article about Cassie De Pecol, who had set the Guinness World Record for visiting every country in the fastest time. Jessica looked at the feat and thought, wouldn’t it be nice to become the first Black woman to do it? The circumstances and time would never be perfect for her to start globe-trotting, so she decided to just do it. Alone.
And so in February 2017 she said goodbye to family in Detroit, Michigan, and set out to visit every country she’d never been to before – becoming the first documented black woman to ever do so when she landed in the Seychelles just over two years later. This is how she did it.
“Prior to my journey to every country in the world, I had travelled very extensively,” the Ugandan-American told Forbes.
Her intrepid parents had been globetrotting with her since she was four, so by the time she decided to see the rest of the planet, Jessica had already visited a fair bit of this planet.
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“It was in February 2017 that I decided to set a deadline. A goal that I’ve had since my early twenties [was] to visit every country in the world, so I set that goal, and at that point I had already visited 60 countries.”
Jessica shared her adventures on the blog Catch Me If You Can and on Instagram, becoming an influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers.
“In October 2019 I visited the Seychelles which was my 195th country.” Making the achievement bitter-sweet was the fact that it was her late father’s birthday – 6 October.
While there’s safety in numbers and travelling with friends or family has its benefits, there’s something empowering about solo travel. “The benefit of solo travel is that it allows you the opportunity to connect with local people better,” Jessica told Travel + Leisure.
“When we travel with others, we’re there with those people, so oftentimes, we don’t get to know the local people. Solo travel allows you, in many ways, to explore a country deeper in terms of building those relationships and spending more time engaging with locals.”
Like many people across the world, the influencer was stuck home under lockdown for months on end when Covid-19 was declared a pandemic. So it was a matter of perfect timing for the former corporate worker to achieve her goal a couple of months before Wuhan sounded the alarm.
An entrepreneur at heart, Jessica has since started a home décor and fashion accessories business and she still plans to go on more voyages across the globe – because once the travel bug bites . . .
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Prior to chasing her dream to visit all 195 territories recognised as sovereign states, Jessica had also started a travel agency and taught English in Japan after working for the UN as a diplomat – living in Benin then Rome. One of the things that afforded her this kind of innovative thinking was her academic background.
“I did my undergrad at St. John’s University in New York and I did my master’s degree at the London School of Economics,” she said. “I left my job in corporate America in 2008 and decided to go to Japan to teach English.”
Travel is one of the greatest teachers outside the classroom, though, which is a lesson Jessica has discovered for herself and all by herself.
“For me, after visiting every country in the world, it’s blatantly clear that most people are good,” she told Forbes.
The most extreme place she ever visited, she told National Geographic, was South Sudan, which had been considered dangerous and insecure by the US Embassy when she worked as a diplomat.
“But I always say no country in the world is completely safe, and no country in the world is completely unsafe. You find what you’re seeking. What I’m seeking is humanity. I’m seeking love. So I went anyway. I spent my time there with a South Sudanese woman, Nyankuir.
“I didn’t want to go to a compound and never leave it. Instead, I visited a cattle camp—cattle are an extremely important aspect of Dinka culture. I spent time speaking to the elders and the children, and I found out my bride price—30 cattle, at most, because at five-foot seven, I’m considered short there.”
Jessica’s advice for anyone who want to follow in her footsteps, so to speak, is simple.
“Travel with kindness, travel with positive energy and without fear. I think what holds people back a lot of the time is fear of the unknown.”
Sources: Instagram.com; forbes.com; nationalgeographic.com; travelandleisure.com
