Talking Sheep
It’s down to hours. Honestly, writing is probably not the smartest choice at the moment because I have to leave for the airport in a very few hours, but whatever. I’m here, well for now at least.
My life at the moment is centered around one vital life source. My complete and utter hate of packing. Of course, I must say that this has not been such a simple task as packing the bags and leaving, but rather packing up my life in Houston, then packing it into a Nissan Altima, driving 2900 miles in four days, unpacking the car in Seattle, buying everything I could possibly need at REI, then trying to pack my abbreviated life into two checked bags, a carry-on, and a personal item. In other words, packing has been a state of being, and I’m ready for something different.
It is really just hours— I can’t even convince myself of that. Again, I should probably be more specific. I leave Seattle at 9am for Washington DC to attend my staging event, which is basically a more official sounding way of saying orientation. At this point I meet up with all of my fellow Peace Corps volunteers who are also going to Namibia, so that we can fly on a group flight overseas. While I’m excited to meet everyone and to get going, the orientation part of this sounds about as entertaining as a 8am class about the history of lawnmowers. At this point, I am just wondering what I have forgotten to pack. Hopefully nothing important, but there will be something.
After seeing what went into my bags, I believe that REI will make it through the recession. From what I’ve heard from other volunteers, Peace Corps could hold up REI purely on it’s own. Seriously, I can’t even describe how ridiculous it feels. I walked into the store knowing that I was going to struggle in my walk back to the car because of the bags and bags of random stuff, but I never could have anticipated feeling like I had just bought an entirely new life. Preparing to leave is emphasizing the very ideas that I can’t wait to leave behind.
At this point, I feel ready. There isn’t much else I could say, think, or do to make me feel any better. Well, actually that’s not completely true. Peace Corps told me to learn French before I left, and that just didn’t happen the way it was supposed to. I was told to be semi-fluent before I left, which gave me a grand total of five weeks to go from absolutely nothing to “semi-fluent”. Right. Had I been successful in that, Darwin would have come knocking on my door. There have been things that I have lost sleep over, but this isn’t one of them.
OK, so key points: I hate packing, I leave for staging in less than six hours, and I leave for Namibia on Thursday evening. Oh, and I still can’t speak french. My phone should work for the first few days in Namibia, but it will be $2.50 per minute to make or receive calls (which in my mind kind of invalidates that point). On that note, I need to get some sleep. I expect to update again before I leave on Thursday, thus this week is a big blog week for me I guess. Which is good, but bad for sleep. OK seriously, I have said enough, and my eyes are closing. Well, temporarily anyway.
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