5 days to go!

Hello wide world of the blogosphere! Also, friends and family members dear.

In five days, I will be heading to Chicago. Then I will skip over to London, after which I will fly to my final destination, Nairobi, Kenya, home for about five months. There's a lot to do between now and then, so I'm working on slowly whittling the to-do list.

I'm traveling with a group from the University of Minnesota. My program is called Minnesota Studies in International Development, so for the four months I'm in school (my last month abroad is reserved for traveling), I'm going to try to figure out that big ol' D, Development. I've been doing some assigned reading for the trip, some of which is familiar, some of which is new and exciting. I'm finding vocabulary for intuitions I've had--for instance, I just read an article about how the term development implies a linearity, that there is one way of coming to one goal rather than a multitude of human arrangements. But I guess the point is that I'll see how my intuitions and the things I learn are bolstered and broken apart by experience.

I'm nervous about a lot of things--meeting my host family, making sure I say goodbye to everybody here, getting everything I need to be ready to go. I'm also concerned about sounding like a fool on this blog, so we'll see how that goes.

I want to let everybody know that I will probably be incommunicado for several days after I leave. Our orientation is in a national park in the north of the country, so I'll be chilling with giraffes and wildebeests or whatever, rather than blogging. I also hope that I'll find a good place to watch the inauguration, for which I am definitely psyched. Think DC is the best place to watch it? Try Kenya.