Showing up in a new place, I am always at a bit of a loss. That really is the excitement of travelling. You get off of a plane and find yourself at the edge of a certain kind of wilderness, not totally sure what you've signed up for or gotten yourself into, or what the next few days or weeks have in store. A sort of ancient fear of the unknown kicks in, and you realize that you are alive and a small thing in big old world. I think that that Ukaipa dwiza kuvina says something about gathering your resources, figuring out what you've got and what you haven't, and moving forward with a bit of chutzpah into the next adventure.
When I first arrived here in Lusaka, Zambia on June 27th, that was just how I felt. I had signed up to be an intern for a project investigating the efficacy of a device that would be used as an intervention in resource-poor settings for obstetrical hemorrhage. A friend and classmate, Julia Bruckner, had done the same, though she was assigned to work in the Copperbelt region, about four hours to the north. After disembarking from a 15 hour flight in Johannesburg, South Africa (this after getting to Atlanta from San Francisco), we were not thrilled to learn that we had missed our connection to Lusaka. We staked out benches in the check-in area, wishing we had thought to abscond with blankets and pillows from the plane. Through the night we contemplated the necessity of the ever-so-brilliant florescent lighting and eclectic music of altering volume provided by the good people of the Johannesburg airport. Our quasi-sleep was punctuated by our own laughter at our pathetic situation, because that was really all we could do. I should mention that we had also been told that we were going to have to pay three hundred dollars in the morning to change our ticket, which added to the misery somewhat. However, a miracle occurred around 5:30am when a lovely woman who may have had a halo over her head handed us our boarding passes without relieving us of our money. A further miracle allowed us to locate our luggage which, via a tour-guided odyssey through the airport, we found languishing in the Doomed Baggage Department. And then we were off.
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