10 Days.....

Ten days from now, on August 15th, I will be making my way to Washington D.C. for a glorious 16 hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa. After spending a week there, including a short homestay in Soweto, it's another flight (much shorter this time, thankfully) to Windhoek, Namibia, my home base for the majority of my four months in Africa. While in Namibia, I'll be doing some travelling. I'll have some homestays, both urban and rural. I'll have an internship with a women's health and HIV/AIDS advocacy group, working on a literacy program for HIV-positive women. I'll be living with and taking classes with 20-something other college students in a house with wireless internet and a pool (so much for roughing it......) I'll leave Namibia to spend a final week in Cape Town and then, finally, on December 6th I'll come home.

Even though I know the details and dates, the whens and wheres of my four months abroad, there is so much I don't know. Who will I meet? What will I do? Will I feel like I have accomplished something, learned something, at the end of my experience. Will I have regrets that I did too much or didn't do enough?

All of those questions I have will remain unanswered until I arrive in Joburg, until I am living in Namibia, or perhaps even until I have been back home and had time to process my experiences. I don't think there's really a way to prepare yourself for a transition to a new place because so many quantities are unknown. I dunno, maybe there is something I should be doing to get ready. Maybe I'm just justifying my procrastination..........