Africa or Bust!

I’m heading to Kenya tomorrow with my mom and Tina (another AYA volunteer) to spend a week before traveling on to Uganda for another week.  It’s been 3 years since I have been back and I can’t wait.  While other AYA staff has made the annual voyage in my place after the birth of my son in May 2007, I decided to stay put while he was so young. Now that he is a bit older, I feel better about leaving (especially after he redecorated ALL of our living room furniture this morning with a black ink pen!).

I am keeping this blog while I am gone, not because I think I am so utterly fascinating that people will want to keep up with my every move, but to give a glimpse into the lives of African people and the amazing things AYA and our partners are accomplishing and the desperate needs that remain.  This will be my sixth journey to Africa and I expect it will be as intriguing and meaningful as the trips prior.  Along the way we will visit urban slums and rural villages, see old friends and meet new ones, laugh and cry, feel hope and despair, stick out like soar thumbs, get bloated from orange Fantas served everywhere we go, eat freshly butchered chicken cooked over a fire pit, wonder what we are eating, wonder how we got our self into this mess again, miss our families, miss ice, share the road with an obscene number of potholes and goats, and see the joyous, beautiful children of Africa that remind us why we came half-way across the world in the first place.