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In about 18 hours I'll be getting on my first of many flights that will eventually put me in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Tomorrow I'm flying to Albany to visit my Granddaddy and his wife Mary Beth. After spending the weekend with them I'll head to Philadelphia Monday morning. Early Tuesday morning I depart for Tanzania! I'll spend five days in Dar Es Salaam, going through all the administrative work that goes along with living in a foreign country and getting survival courses in language and security. Then we'll bus about 200km east to Morogoro. Morogoro is a smaller city of about 200,000. I'll be living with a host family and training six days a week. That training will be composed generally of language, teaching, and cultural adjustment. For the three months I'll be there, weather is generally high 70's to low 80's during the day and 50's-60's at night. Pretty excellent I'd say.
I, of course, procrastinated on packing so the last two days have been devoted to running errands and getting everything stuffed into a couple bags. Speaking of which, I did it!
This is (basically) everything I'm taking, which means I'm packed! Which is really pretty awesome. I'm bringing 80lbs plus carrying on a small backpack. I was hoping to be a little lighter, but the limit is 100lbs, so all is well.
Along with all the boring normal things you'd expect me to bring for a two year journey (i.e. 2-3 pairs of underwear), here's some fun highlights from my packing list:
- a small solar panel for charging electronics
- lots of rechargeable batteries
- a vegetable peeler and kitchen knife (apparently both are difficult to come by in Tanzania)
- a nice big kite. Its awesome.
- a netbook (which I am writing this on right now!) and an external hard drive full of movies and TV shows
- 3 soccer balls to give to kids in my host family and/or my village
- a "solar shower" which is basically a big black plastic bag with a hose attached to it. Fill the bag with water, let it heat up in the sun, and hang it up somewhere to make a shower.
Tanzania fairly conservative in terms of clothing, so I brought a lot more button down shirts and a lot less jeans than I would have anticipated. I'm evening bringing a suit jacket. Whoa.
Besides packing, the last week or so has been full of family time (weekend at the beach) and saying goodbye to friends and relatives. I drew out the goodbye process with friends for as long as possible and in the process had about 7 goodbye events, so thanks friends! Tonight's the official Olympia goodbye event, so if you happen to be reading this today (Thursday) and are near Olympia, come on over tonight!
So that's about it. I'm surprisingly cool, calm and collected still. We'll see when the nerves kick in.
Yea!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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