Karibu!

Karibu! Welcome to the second installment of my summer blog. Rather than starting a new one, I figured I’d just add on toand change the name of the old. Oh, the Places I go! The H is for harvard (and the purposes of finding a unique URL...). I think I’ll use this to document all the places Harvard will take me during my four years there. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for quite a few more.

After spending two and a half weeks with the ravishing Radcliffe Pitches on our summer tour to San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, B.C., and Whistler, B.C. in which we stayed at 5-star hotels and homes, discovered the beauty of dim-sum, redwood trees and tandem bicycling, I find myself in beautiful Tanzania. I’d been preparing myself—mentally, mostly—for my internship with the Association of Private Health Facilities in Tanzania (APHFTA) since I was notified that my application had been selected in mid-December. I’d taken a semester of Kiswahili tutorial in preparation—although, I couldn’t learn too much with only two hours of class per week, but it at least gave me a jumping off point, applied for grants, spoken extensively with last year’s interns, worked Dorm Crew for some extra cash—even though I swore last year that I would never do it again, and now here I am. It wasn’t until after the nearly 27 hours of flight from Vancouver to Dar es Salaam that it really hit me: Eight weeks in Tanzania… While the very distinct smell of a particular type of humidity wafted over me as I waited in line for my visa, I wondered incredulously to my self: What am I doing here? I was about to spend two months traveling around a country whose language I barely spoke, training nurses in various clinics which I hardly felt qualified to do, and all alone—at times—or with a group of students who knew hardly more than I. I immediately fast-forwarded to the end of the summer, imagining a new me—a me with life skills and street smarts, a me that knew Swahili and could travel around a country by herself without clutching her purse timidly to her side, a me that had survived this, because I know that I will.