When Linnea Olson was raising her children, she told them what many parents tell a child: when you’re sad, think of a happy place. That place might by Disneyland or it might be unwrapping presents under the Christmas tree. The specifics aren’t as important as the perspective. Whatever you’re going through, it will pass and there will be better days.

Olson had seen plenty of trying times. As a single mother, she had been on food stamps and welfare. And then came cancer. For the last fourteen years she has lived with stage four metastatic lung cancer. Disneyland and Christmas were not quite cutting it. She needed a new happy place and found it as part of an Odyssey Program with A Fresh Chapter.

Terri Wingham, founder of A Fresh Chapter, thought she’d be perfect for the 2017 Peru Odyssey Program. As Linnea recalled, “I tend to be somewhat spontaneous so I said, ‘Hell yes,’ without really understanding what it was. What was astounding for me was that I’m still in treatment. To think of going to a distant country with stage-four lung cancer was kind of wild. But we were volunteering and I loved that.”

The program was possible for Olson through A Fresh Chapter’s Fellows Program, designed for individuals who actively work to advance cancer research and support services. The Fellows Program enables such passionate advocates the opportunity to broaden their work and realize personal growth through an Odyssey program. Linnea, a long-time advocate in the cancer community, found both in a home for underprivileged cancer patients outside Lima.

“Nothing could have prepared me for it,” she said. “I’ve been poor in America—poor with a safety net—but nothing could prepare me for the poverty we experienced in Peru. It was shocking and blew my mind and my heart wide open in a way that was at first almost painful, but painful in a way that pushed me to grow.”

With her tribe of fellow Odyssey participants, Linnea watched poverty flow by the windows of the van that took them to the home for cancer patients and their families each day. There they chopped, peeled, served, and scrubbed dishes to the point of exhaustion, often falling asleep during the van-ride back to their rooming house.

“But even that was super-satisfying,” she recalled. “Like other experiences—childbirth, for example which is moving, but also painful—that kitchen has become elemental. The feeling of immersion forced me to drop my own narrative and get out of my own head.”

Linnea had found a new happy place.

“In that kitchen,” she recalls, “my humanity was awakened in a different way. You start to understand a bit better what is really happening in the rest of the world. And I say ‘start’ because this is just the beginning. Usually with a trip, you get back and you’re done, but Terri takes the concept of tribe and relationships very seriously. Since we’ve gotten back she’s made sure the relationships are maintained.”

Linnea had long been involved in advocacy work to alleviate human suffering, but since Peru her intensity has lifted. “For my own cancer treatment, I was getting the best of care in one of the best hospitals in the world. Everything was state-of-the-art,” she explained. “But these people had no soap and no toilet paper. Their food was fresh, but basic. We made soup with chicken feet in it. The people would come with containers and take half the meal home with them. It was probably their only food for the entire day.”

“I came back braver and smarter and more empathetic,” she continued. “I came back feeling several layers I didn’t know existed had been peeled away. In the world of advocacy there is a lot of kissing-ass, but I don’t have time for that. Coming back, I felt different and looked at everything differently, including advocacy. I’m better able to see the bigger picture and to really feel the heart of that advocacy work.”

She’s also doing more with less. Downsizing is a new ethic. “Since Peru, I’ve been fascinated with what I can do without. And it all started in that kitchen. I got strafed there emotionally, but in a good way. Seeing the mean ingredients they had and the great dishes they made from them woke me up.”