Why I Built Meza
by Matt, Founder of Meza
In 2016, I spent a semester studying Chinese in Beijing. I celebrated Chinese New Year with a local family, setting off fireworks and folding dumplings around their table. Not long after, I volunteered on a farm in a rural village, eating rice and vegetables the family grew themselves. I came home for my last year of college feeling like a different person, but I couldn't pinpoint what had actually changed.
So I made myself a promise: graduate, get a "good" job, save up, and go chase what I felt in China. After a few years in management consulting, I set out on what I called my "adult gap year." It was supposed to last ten months. But it turned into a year and a half, because every time I got close to coming home, I found one more reason to stay.
I lived with families in Guatemala and Nicaragua to learn Spanish, biked across El Salvador learning to make pupusas on the side of the road, and tried to teach myself to surf from a few YouTube tutorials along Central America's Pacific coast. After that, I bounced around Central Asia and North Africa. I lived with nomadic families in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, explored the old Silk Road in Uzbekistan, and cooked tagine in the sand with an Amazigh family in the Sahara Desert of Morocco.
I saw plenty of the famous stuff too, and it was great. But that's not what stuck with me. Living on that farm in China taught me more than any temple could have. Making pupusas on that curb taught me more about El Salvador than any ruin. A week with my new family in the Sahara taught me more about what matters in life than any view ever has. Being let into someone's world like that gave me a real connection to the people and places I visited, and it made me think hard about how I wanted to live and who I wanted to be.
I came home from my adult gap year more curious than I'd ever been, more patient, and a lot less sure that the way I'd always lived was right for me.
Then, the pressures of society got louder, and I ended up back in a traditional job. But the same thought kept nagging at me.
If more people could experience the world the way I did on my adult gap year, with the intent to connect and learn, I think the world would be a kinder place.
The catch is that traveling that way takes knowing where to go, and relationships that take real time to build. I only found my way there because I spent a year and a half stumbling toward it, one invitation at a time.
That's really the whole reason Meza exists: to help other people experience the world in a way I know can bring them closer to other people, other cultures, and themselves.
