Tomorrow morning I'm leaving home at 10. I will be driving 3 hours to Chicago, getting on a plane at 4, and taking off. I'm in for around 28 hours of total travel time, with a brief layover in lovely Amsterdam. Somehow I'm still not convinced I'm really leaving.
For the past few days I've been caught in the desperate struggle between bringing too much, or bringing too little: Do I really need to bring 20 books...? I could go without shampoo for five months right....? Even though it does seem to keep slipping my mind, I will be in Nairobi, a major city for 2/3 of my time and could probably find a way to get a hold of just about anything I might forget. I think, maybe because I've had so little experience with big cities in Africa I picture everything as rural, like I'll just be out in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe that's because that always seems to be how Africa in general is portrayed in a lot of popular culture. I've been trying to prepare my self for being wrong a lot, the image I've always had in my head of Kenya has been colored by my experience in Rwanda and my exposure to pop culture. The real place I will be traveling to tomorrow will probably not fit into those boxes I've created, it will be real and unique; and the experiences I imagine myself having will probably be much more amazing and uncomfortable than I prefer to picture them being.
All this boiling down to excited-terror. I don't know who or what experiences are waiting for me in Kenya but I think I'm as ready as I can be at this point to face them head on.
No comments:
Post a Comment