T minus 162 hours.....

A week from today I will be visiting the homeland [well at least my homeland :-)] for about 7 weeks. I’ve wanted to do this trip for a while now, but it only became a concrete plan about a year ago. My vision is to have a complete change of environment in a somewhat familiar place, where I sort of know people but they don’t know much about me. My home barrio of Nibaje seemed like the perfect place for this. I used my connections in the island to rent an apartment for the time I’ll be there. I will be arriving in the Santiago airport a week from today. I am both excited and nervous about this trip, and in light of recent news about a relative there, also sad.

There will be a humanitarian component to this trip as well, because the altruist in me can’t pass up the opportunity to give back. I will be volunteering part-time in an elementary school while I’m there. I attended this school for about a year as a kid but have very little memories from that time. I’m looking forward to learning different approaches to the ones I use here.

I’m also looking forward to revisiting childhood memories and sharing them with Duke. I am also a little anxious and scared that I have over-romanticized this trip. I’m afraid once I arrived there and compare my fantasy to reality I would be miserable or disappointed, but that’s just a small fear. After all, it’s bad experiences that make great future stories. I am armed with mosquito repellent, a first aid kit, and my rebel….seriously, what could possibly go wrong? I’ll also have internet access so I’ll be posting frequent updates and uploading pictures to my flickr page, so stay tuned.

mdl