How Interviewing Daniela Kon Changed My Approach to Ethical Travel

✈️ The moment I understood the politics of compassion wasn’t in a lecture hall—it was standing barefoot in a rain-soaked olive grove outside Škofja Loka, Slovenia, holding a chipped ceramic cup of strong black coffee while Daniela Kon asked me, ‘What did you expect to find here? A solution? Or just proof that people still care?’ Her question didn’t come with judgment—it arrived like breath after holding it too long. That interview reshaped how I travel: not as an observer collecting stories, but as a participant learning how compassion operates in real time—through shared labor, imperfect translation, and the quiet refusal to look away. This is how I learned what the politics of compassion means on the ground—and how to practice it without performance.

I’d spent months researching grassroots migration support networks along the Balkan Route. Not the headlines—the ones about border closures or NGO funding—but the unglamorous, daily work happening in villages where official aid rarely reaches: food distribution in abandoned school gyms, language circles held in living rooms, bicycle repair workshops for people who’d walked across three countries. Daniela Kon’s name kept appearing—not in press releases, but in handwritten notes passed between volunteers in Postojna, in WhatsApp groups named ‘Za skupaj’ (‘Together’), and in the margins of a dog-eared copy of 1 I found at a secondhand bookstore in Ljubljana. She co-founded Kolektiv za Solidarnost, a small, volunteer-run initiative operating across Slovenia and western Croatia, focused less on ‘helping’ and more on co-creating conditions where dignity isn’t conditional on paperwork or proven need.

I booked a train ticket from Vienna to Ljubljana in early October—shoulder season, when tourist crowds thin but mountain air stays crisp, and bus schedules haven’t yet contracted for winter. My plan was straightforward: spend two weeks moving slowly—by regional train (🚋), infrequent local bus (🚌), and walking—between three nodes: Ljubljana (for context), Škofja Loka (where Kolektiv’s main coordination hub operated out of a repurposed textile workshop), and the village of Čakovec near the Croatian border (where they ran a seasonal shelter in partnership with local farmers). I carried only what fit in a 40L pack: rain shell, thermos, notebook bound in recycled paper, and a laminated phrase sheet with Slovene and Croatian verbs for ‘to listen’, ‘to wait’, and ‘to share’. No agenda beyond presence—and the humility to revise it daily.

🌧️ The turning point came on day four—not with drama, but with silence.

I’d arrived at the Škofja Loka workshop expecting interviews. Instead, Daniela handed me a pair of rubber gloves and gestured toward crates of donated apples. ‘They’re from a nearby orchard,’ she said in careful English. ‘We’ll sort, then make compote for tonight’s dinner. After that, if you still want to talk—we’ll talk.’ No invitation to observe. No permission slip. Just work. I peeled gloves off my damp hands and joined six others—two Croatian university students, a retired Slovene teacher, a Roma woman from Maribor who spoke four languages but preferred to communicate in gestures and rhythm, and a young Afghan man named Tariq who’d been volunteering there for seven months. We worked in near silence for ninety minutes—hands cold, apple cores piling up, steam rising from boiling pots in the next room. When Daniela finally wiped her forehead and nodded toward the courtyard, I realized I’d spent more time noticing the weight of a bruised apple in my palm, the way light caught dust motes above the stove, and the cadence of someone humming a Bosnian folk tune than I had rehearsing questions.

That afternoon, over tea brewed from dried mountain sage, Daniela explained: ‘Compassion isn’t a thing you bring. It’s a posture you hold. And posture changes when your hands are full—not with answers, but with tasks that matter to someone else.’ She didn’t say it as doctrine. She said it while peeling a tangerine, handing me half without looking up. The politics weren’t theoretical. They were logistical: who gets the last warm seat by the stove? Whose translation gets prioritized when documents arrive late? How do you redistribute power when one person speaks five languages and another hasn’t slept in forty-eight hours?

🤝 The discovery unfolded incrementally—not in revelations, but in repetitions.

Over the next ten days, I stopped taking notes during conversations and started sketching instead: floor plans of shared kitchens, diagrams of how laundry rotated between families, timelines of how a single donated laptop moved between three people learning German. I learned that ‘solidarity’ here meant refusing to separate ‘refugee’ from ‘local’—Tariq taught carpentry to Slovene teens; the retired teacher tutored Arabic speakers in math; the Roma woman coordinated transport using WhatsApp groups that mixed dialects, emojis, and voice notes. There was no hierarchy of need—only shifting constellations of skill, fatigue, and availability.

One rainy morning, Daniela took me to visit Mateja, a farmer outside Čakovec who hosted the seasonal shelter in his barn’s converted hayloft. We walked past rows of late-harvested pumpkins, their skins waxy and cool under mist. Inside the barn, twelve people were gathered—not in rows, but around low tables: children drawing with crayons, adults folding clothes, two men repairing bicycles salvaged from a local dump. Mateja served thick cornbread and sour milk, explaining that he’d opened the space after his neighbor’s son—a Syrian medical student—had helped deliver his granddaughter during a blizzard. ‘He didn’t ask permission,’ Mateja said, wiping flour from his beard. ‘He just stood in the doorway and said, “Let me help.” That’s how it starts. Not with policy. With showing up.’

The most disorienting moment came during a ‘language circle’ in the Ljubljana hub. No teachers. No curriculum. Just chairs arranged in a circle, a whiteboard, and markers. People wrote words they needed most that day: ‘hospital’, ‘headache’, ‘I miss my mother’, ‘how much does this cost?’, ‘my papers are lost’. Then, someone would draw it. Or act it out. Or hum a melody until recognition lit someone’s face. Compassion wasn’t expressed in grand gestures—it lived in the pause before correcting pronunciation, in the willingness to mispronounce a word three times before someone gently offered the sound, in the shared laughter when ‘passport’ became ‘past-a-port’ and everyone clapped anyway.

🌄 The journey continued—not geographically, but relationally.

I left Slovenia after sixteen days, but didn’t stop engaging. Daniela and I agreed on one boundary: no follow-up interviews. Instead, we exchanged practical commitments. I translated three pages of Slovene-language legal aid pamphlets into plain English—not for publication, but for internal use by volunteers who’d recently arrived from English-speaking countries. She sent me updates—not stories, but logistics: ‘The bus line to Murska Sobota now runs twice daily again,’ ‘The library in Škofja Loka extended evening hours for study groups,’ ‘Three more families moved into the cooperative housing project in Velenje.’ These weren’t anecdotes. They were indicators of infrastructure holding—or fraying.

Back home, I reorganized my travel planning entirely. No more ‘top 5 volunteer programs’ lists. Instead, I mapped connections: Which local bookshops stocked bilingual children’s books? Which community centers hosted free sewing classes open to all residents, regardless of status? Which bakeries donated day-old bread to neighborhood fridges? I began measuring accessibility not by Wi-Fi speed or hotel star ratings, but by how easily a stranger could sit at a table without being asked for ID, how many public benches faced east for morning sun, how often municipal notices appeared in more than one language—even if imperfectly translated.

💡 Reflection: Travel isn’t neutral terrain.

This trip dismantled my assumption that ethical travel required ‘doing good.’ What I witnessed was far more demanding—and far more sustainable: making space. Space for uncertainty. Space for friction. Space for people to define their own needs, even when those needs contradicted NGO reports or donor priorities. Daniela never used the word ‘impact.’ She talked about ‘duration’—how long something lasts beyond photo ops, how many hands keep a kitchen running when external funding dries up, whether a teenager who learned carpentry here continues building shelves for neighbors years later.

I’d gone searching for the ‘politics of compassion’ expecting manifestos or policy proposals. Instead, I found it in the rust on a shared bicycle chain, in the way someone held open a door for a person carrying three bags and a sleeping child, in the collective decision to delay dinner thirty minutes so someone could finish a phone call home. Compassion wasn’t soft. It was structural. It required systems—however informal—that distributed responsibility, not saviorism. And travel, when practiced this way, became less about witnessing and more about participating in maintenance: of relationships, of trust, of the mundane machinery that keeps people fed, housed, and seen.

📝 Practical takeaways—woven from experience, not theory

None of this required special status, fluency, or funding. It required attention—and the willingness to adjust expectations minute by minute:

• 🔍Look for the ‘unphotographable’ infrastructure. Before booking accommodation, check if your neighborhood has a zadruga (cooperative), a public laundromat open to all, or a community fridge. These aren’t tourist attractions—they’re pulse points of everyday solidarity.
• 🚌Use regional transport as orientation—not convenience. Local buses and trains force slowness. You’ll overhear conversations, notice which stops lack shelters, see where people gather to wait. On the Ljubljana–Čakovec route, I learned more about cross-border labor patterns from watching who boarded at each stop than from any briefing document.
• ☕Bring something usable—not symbolic. Skip the ‘I ❤️ [Country]’ t-shirt. Bring spare phone chargers, multilingual phrasebooks with blank pages for notes, or reusable containers for sharing food. Daniela’s team kept a shelf of mismatched mugs—each donated, each with its own chip or stain. ‘They remind us,’ she said, ‘that care isn’t polished. It’s lived in.’
• 📝Ask permission before documenting—even casually. I stopped taking candid photos after Tariq quietly pointed to his wristwatch and said, ‘Time is mine too.’ Now I ask: ‘May I write this down? May I share it? With whom?’ Often, the answer is ‘not yet’—and that’s information worth honoring.

⭐ Conclusion: Compassion doesn’t scale. It anchors.

I used to think transformative travel required crossing oceans or summiting peaks. Daniela Kon taught me it requires showing up—with hands willing to sort apples, ears willing to hear mistranslations, and heart willing to sit with discomfort when your assumptions don’t match reality. The politics of compassion isn’t about grand ideology. It’s about fidelity to the immediate: the person beside you on the bus, the language barrier between you and the baker, the shared silence while waiting for rain to pass. It’s practiced in the unglamorous, unshareable moments—the kind no algorithm rewards, but which change how you move through every place, long after the suitcase is unpacked.