A Bit of a False Start

Welcome to my first crack at blogging! No, we are not counting the LiveJournal I kept in high school. Apologies in advance if this is not as witty and interesting as the rest of the blogs that you follow. But thank you for reading all the way to the fourth sentence, regardless.

My TIE adventure has gotten off to a bit of a false start. Due to some "weather" (don't we always have weather? I hate how airlines call it that) and an extremely overbooked flight from LaGuardia to Atlanta, we were over an hour delayed and I unfortunately missed my connection to Johannesburg. As expected, there is only one of those 15.5 hour flights every day (the fourth-longest "ultra long-haul" flight in the world!), so now here I am in the Airport Westin in Atlanta waiting for the Saturday flight instead. Luckily everyone waiting for me on the other end has been so accommodating and understanding, so I should hopefully be good to go when I (finally!) arrive in South Africa.

The past week has been an emotional whirlwind of preparation, and then some. My best friend and roommate of 8 years moved out (eventually to Atlanta, ironically) on Tuesday, and then I moved out of our apartment of 5 years on Thursday (as my lease ending just happened to coincide with my leaving for TIE). Needless to say, I spent the past few weeks packing a bit more than just my suitcase for the next month.

All of the preparation and recent life changes has allowed me to stay busy so I couldn't dwell on any one thing for too long, and now that I've had the chance to really give some thought to what I'm about to do next month, I can say that while I am definitely nervous, I am mostly excited and eager to see what's ahead. I'm a bit of a control freak, so my current nerves are mostly to do with my lack of routine and understanding of my day-to-day life in Pretoria. But I'm excited to do something completely different. I haven't really done that since I studied abroad in Paris for a semester during my junior year of college, but even then, I was going with some acquaintances from school, and was part of a much larger program. And even moving to NYC felt pretty "safe" at the time, as I was lucky enough to move with a lot of my closest friends from college.

This time, I'm on my own. It's definitely going to be a test of my self-confidence and resourcefulness, but I'm looking forward to that. It's been awhile since I've pushed myself in this way, and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to participate in TIE. That, and I wanted the opportunity to give back to the world in a meaningful way (more than just donating some seriously ugly clothes to the Bowery Mission). It's so easy to get caught up in what we're doing in the city, between work and socializing, and it felt like it was time to hit pause on that life for a minute and try to do something bigger. I feel very lucky that I was given the opportunity to actually do that, and for such a substantial amount of time.

So we'll see how it goes! I hope that I can be helpful to the people I'm working with, and actually have some kind of valuable impact in the 4 short weeks that I'm there. I know I will learn a lot from them, and I hope that I can offer a little something, too.

And finally - thank you to everyone for the outpouring of kind, supportive, encouraging words over the past few days. It means more than you know.

More to come...