First post

"Hamana nale kui,
Nale kui."

Here we go round,
Go round.
- a Hadza dance

Welcome to my Peace Corps blog! Only 4 weeks left until I ship out. Until then I'll be home in Maine trying to relax, learn some Swahili, and desperately figure out what my 80 pounds of luggage should consist of.

On September 18th I fly down to Philadelphia for staging, which from what I can tell consists of three days of shots, crash courses on "what not to do in Africa," and frayed nerves.

On the 20th all the volunteers in my training group are flown to Tanzania's port city Dar es Salaam. From there I'll have three months of intense language, technical, and survival training at a Peace Corps facility. For this period I'll be living with a local host family. I never got a chance to do the overseas study/home stay thing while in college, (engineering major), so I'm really looking forward to this part.

Training ends in December, and the volunteers scatter to their various posts. Two years of living on my own in Africa with minimal, (if any), running water and electricity. It’ll be a challenge, for sure… but I’m sure I’ll get into the rhythm of things. As for the work I'll be doing, my official assignment is "information and communication technology education and development." I'm sure I won't have a realistic idea of what that actually entails until I'm on site.

So with less than a month to go before my departure date, I would be lying if I said I wasn't starting to get anxious. It's not a bad sort of anxiety, but the reality of this whole endeavor has definitely sunk in. Don't get me wrong, I am incredibly excited for what lies ahead... but it is a bit surreal knowing that almost every aspect of my life is going to be completely different in only a few short weeks. I’d like to think I have an idea of what I’m getting myself into, but I’m sure most preconceptions I have are going to be blown out of the water the moment I get there. Without a doubt, I am in for a very real adventure.

(And as for the title “from Away,” it’s mildly clever, I promise. We’re clever folk, us Mainers. Wicked clever.)