March 16 approaches

Yesterday was my last day of paint slinging (the term for what a bad painter does). Now, with nothing to do but get excited for my sioree in Africa, I'm, well, getting excited.

My departure date, March 16, is quickly approaching. At 6:55pm I fly out of Dulles Int'l Airport in DC, bound for Nairobi. I'll arrive at Kenyatta Int'l Airport the next day after a short layover in London. I will spend my 12 days in Kenya with Dan Cross-Call and Clementine James. Clementine has been working as an event planner in London since graduation and Dan has been in Ghana volunteering for an NGO-headed education initiative.

On March 29 I leave for Namibia, spend a night in Johannesburg and arrive in Windohek on the 30th. My friend/boss, Stasja, is planning a little welcoming party, a camping trip, beginning the day I arrive; it looks like I'll hit the ground running. Camping usually consists of consuming kilos of meat and gallons of beer while making small talk and staring into a large fire waiting for more meat to cook, so I should be OK.

I'll be in Namibia until the beginning of September working on a community development project centered around a wilderness campground, the Treesleeper Camp, that offers both lodging and cultural activities for tourists. During April, May and June I will acclimatize myself to living in a small village, Tsintsabis, and to the challenge of operating a small business there. I will split my time between helping Stasja with his projects and working on projects of my own. Projects are, in a general sense, discrete tasks that don't have to do with the everyday functioning of the camp. My projects will include creating a bookkeeping system for the camp, training camp employees in appropriate service standards, organizing women to make crafts to sell at the camp, helping install solar-powered water pumps ("geysers") at the camp, etc.

In July a group of volunteers from Raleigh International, a British volunteer aid organization, will be coming to spend two months helping build a cultural center at Treesleeper. I'll be helping manage their their effort and working beside them to raise the roof, both literally and figuratively.

That's the general gist of what I will be doing in the next six months. I will have email and I will have a mailing address. I'll post those when I know what they are.

Live is Life

I think Opus chose to sing "Live is life" because it rolls off the tongue better
than "Life is live." They really wanted to scream "Life is live," but it just
didn't jibe as lyrics. They decided instead to take some poetic license with the
phrase. It has now been enshrined in one of the most popular jock jams in modern
sports history. If you ever go to a Dartmouth hockey game, listen as the home
team skates out onto the ice. You'll hear it. It's amazing.

It's such an amzaing and inspiring song that I decided to name my blog after it.
You'll find a little excerpt from the lyrics under the title at the top of the
home page. Basically what Opus is saying is that life comes at you fast and
there's not a lot of time to react. You're like a goalie in a hockey being
sprayed left and right by slapshots during a power play (bad simile, check). You
don't have time to think. You just play. And while you're out there, you and
your team "all give the best, every minute of an hour don't think abou the
rest..." etc. Live is life.

I'm fond of rhetorical questions, my favorite being, "Is not life a hunred times
too short to bore ourselfes?" By asking this question, ol' Fred Nietzsche
implores us to take advantage of our lives and not to bore ourselves with
contentment. We should live with a master's, not a slave's, mentality: be noble,
brave, intrepid. If Nietzsche were alive now, he'd be an Opus fan.

Now, with Nietzsche's advice and Opus' music egging me on, I'm preparing for a
trip to Namibia to find out just how "live" life is. I've created this blog as a
way for me to keep in touch with you and vice versa while I'm over there. I find
that I'm more inclined to read a long blog post than a long email, so instead of
getting long, boring, philosophical emails that you'll want to delete because
you hate reading long emails, you will be able to (at your convenience) read
exciting, interesting, evocative blog posts. Yeah!

Now, it's time to get the show on the road. Live is Life.

Test

This is post numero uno.