What scares you the most in your life? Is it losing someone you love? Something happening to your kids? Getting diagnosed with Cancer? Experiencing a reoccurrence of that cancer?

With only five days left until I board my flight to London en route to Africa, I have plenty of fears to keep me up late into the night as I sprint along my mental hamster wheel. Fears about arriving alone in a foreign country, immersing myself in a new culture, wondering how much of an impact I can make in only 6 weeks of volunteering, and probably my biggest fear: deciding what to do with my life when I return home.

In preparation for this trip, I recently read Nelson Mandela’s book “Long Walk to Freedom” and I am reminded that many people around the world have overcome fears much bigger than I could ever imagine.

In the last chapter of his book, Nelson Mandela says, “The policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting wound in my country and my people. All of us will spend many years, if not generations, recovering from that profound hurt. But the decades of oppression and brutality had another, unintended effect, and that was that it produced the Oliver Tambos, the Walter Sisulus…the Robert Subukwes of our time – men of such extraordinary character, wisdom, and generosity, that their like may never be known again. Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character…

It is from the comrades in this struggle that I learned the meaning of courage. Time and again I have seen men and women risk and give their lives for an idea…I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear more times than I can remember, but I hid behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers fear.”

As I journey to South Africa, I will carry his words with me and hope that by continuing to step into my fears, I will emerge from this experience a little braver and a lot wiser.