Every Day the River Changes: Jordan Salama '19's journey along the Magdalena River

The combination of Jordan Salama's personal drive, choices and chance encounters paved the way for him to have a life-changing experience that, through his passion and talent, he would ultimately share in his book Every Day The River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena.

Jordan discusses his journey, and interests, passions and drive behind his book. 

On studying abroad:

What I would say to people who aren't considering going abroad ...You don't have to necessarily travel far to have the kinds of experiences that are worth traveling for. I think with the pandemic, we all stopped moving around as much. And one of the things that I had to do as a travel writer or a writer who writes about the world, was to find pockets of the world close to where I live. Luckily, I live in a city like New York, where you can find these amazing pockets of culture wherever you go. And so I gravitated towards "adventures" that I could have just a couple miles from my house that brought the world to my doorstep. So I don't necessarily think you have to leave the country to have an international experience because we live in a country that is made up of immigrants.

I can also say something, which is one of the things that I knew after my freshman year, was that I didn't want to do a two-month marathon and study abroad type thing, which a lot of the formal programs at Princeton are eight weeks. I was homesick. It was hard. When you go to college for the first time, your first year, it's really hard. And I don't even live that far from Princeton. My family lives about an hour and a half from Princeton driving. But that doesn't mean that you don't miss being with your family and spending time at home. It's important to recharge. At Princeton, you don't have to go away for the eight weeks of the formal programs. There are opportunities, as we know, through departments like SPO, that allow you to build your own international experiences for however much time you want. If you want it to be a week, great! If you want it to be four weeks, great! If you want it to be more than eight weeks, [that's] great, too! So if what's holding you back is that you feel like the study abroad programs that are offered through formal channels at Princeton are prescribed lengths or [specific] things that you have to do, my answer would be you can always create your own adventure here."

On learning another language:

Jordan offered some advice on learning another language. He states, "[imagine] how much richer an encounter or an interaction or conversation can be, even if you don't have the slightest idea of how to speak the language, you don't have to be fluent. I think that even if you can make that introductory 'small talk' and have a conversation that is a human, normal conversation, to the slightest degree, even without fluency, it means that the barrier of language is broken between you. Even if you have a translator sitting right there, making sure that everything is correct, you can at least follow along a little bit. It makes all the difference.

I think that one of the main reasons why the book worked was because I've chose a place where I could speak the language of the people. I didn't need to translate. I speak Spanish. But let's say I [start doing] more work in the Middle East and I don't really speak Arabic. I've been learning over the past couple of years, and I'm totally far from fluent. There's no way I'd be able to do a complicated story without a translator. But what I could do is sit down and have a conversation with somebody about where I'm from, where they're from, what we do for work, what we like to eat, what music we like to listen to. That's a really important aspect of it, too. So it doesn't matter [if you are in a 100 level course]. [Language] is really important no matter what you want to do [because] there are very few lines of work that don't involve being a people person. And so I think that taking language classes is one of the most valuable things you can do.

On what he regrets not adding to the book:

I regret not going into more of the musical traditions of the river. Because I didn't have that much time. I had four weeks, as the subtitle suggests, because I was in school and I had other things going on. So there were things that inevitably would have to be left out. What I'm really happy about is now, at National Geographic, I'm able to dig deeper into some of those areas of the book that I didn't get to include in the physical book itself. I'm working on the story now. That took me back to the Magdalena River, writing about music. It's really amazing. It's kind of like, I feel like I'm supplementing the reporting for the book in a new and exciting way.

On journalism as a career:

I can't imagine doing anything else than writing stories. I have a feeling that I would be doing it in a different capacity. Maybe if I wasn't pursuing journalism, I might be a teacher. I think it's about sharing information. I like learning.

On choosing journalism as a career path, he says, "this is not different from teaching in so many ways. What I do now, it's just a different way of getting people educated about the world. The kind of writing that I do, because I don't really do news, I do features that are meant to expand, not only my view of the world, but to expand readers' views of the world. A place like National Geographic, [where you're writing] about history, about nature, about people. So it is, in a way, kind of like teaching a really big class.

On the upcoming book release in Colombia:

This book is largely meant for a general audience, readers in the United States, that might not know a lot about Colombia or about Latin America more broadly. But that said, a lot of Colombian Americans have read it and been grateful for an in depth treatment of the country that is not negative, which is kind of what people have become used to, but also because, just like it would be hard to say what would the American people think of a book about the Mississippi River, the truth is that the United States is a big country, Colombia is a big country. Everybody has different experiences, depending on where they live, what city they live in, if they live in a small town, big city, not every Colombian lives along the Magdalena river. So just like those stories are meaningful for somebody who lives in another country entirely, I hope that Colombian people can take away some of the same core values of this book as anybody else would.