Like many people, I’ve been pushed by the protests for racial justice these past few weeks to take a step back, reexamine my place in this world, and think once again about how so many people go through vastly different experiences in life simply because of the color of their skin.

The historical accounts are a bit fuzzy, but the way the story is commonly told, Caribbean slaves in the 18th century gained a day of freedom two times a year, on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) and New Year’s Day. They made costumes and played music to celebrate, and over the centuries, that tradition evolved into what’s now know as the annual Junkanoo festival, an all-night parade through the streets that’s been compared to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnival in Brazil.

It was the fall of 2016. I had just finished driving 11,000 miles across Europe and Asia -- the story I told on the first season of this podcast -- and now my friend Donna had flown out to Eastern Siberia to join me for the trip back, three quarters of the way across the largest country in the world. I’d hardly spent any time in Russia up to this point, so I really had little idea what to expect.

This week’s episode of Far From Home is a bit different from what I normally do on the show. I’ve been getting a lot of questions and comments from listeners recently, so I spend some time answering some of them and sharing a bit of the feedback I’ve received. I also feature a recent interview I did with Corey Cambridge on his program, OPP (Other People’s Podcast), where I talk a little more about my background and the thinking that goes into my show.

This upcoming January marks the tenth anniversary of the massive earthquake in Haiti. It came on a Tuesday afternoon, 12 days into the new year, and destroyed or severely damaged a quarter of a million homes, killing more than 100,000 people.

When he was growing up in Southern California, Addi Somekh wasn't quite sure what to do with his life. But he knew from a young age that he wanted to "spread warmth" and make other people happy. On this week’s episode, the unusual story of how Addi’s quest to do just that set him off on a worldwide mission to make people laugh.

Cambodia has changed dramatically in recent years. It was just a few decades ago that the country experienced a massive genocide, where about a quarter of its population was killed under the rule of the dictator Pol Pot and his brutal communist followers in the Khmer Rouge. But today it’s become one of Southeast Asia’s tourist hotspots.

It was a Saturday, a few weeks after I’d first met him, when Lucho sent me a text. It was totally last minute, but some people had hired him to lead an ayahuasca healing ceremony that evening in the Huarochiri Valley, an area of shantytowns on the northern outskirts of Lima, Peru. He asked if I wanted to tag along.

Lucho is a traditional medicine man who describes himself as a "curandero," or someone who heals. Using medicinal herbs, archeological relics, and hallucinogenic plants (as well as some special powers), he claims to have rid himself of diabetes and his father of cancer. He regularly travels around Peru treating people with all sorts of ailments. "Some diseases are said to be incurable," he told me, "but in the jungle, there is no way that a disease cannot be cured."

Before traveling to Ireland a few months ago, I’ll confess I knew very little about the island and its history. I had this vague notion – like I think a lot of people – that there had been some fighting in Northern Ireland in the past, but that it was all over now, everyone had moved on, and things were more or less back to normal. So I was surprised to learn that in many ways, that was very much not the case.