First Day Back.

So everyone! For all of you who have been wondering where I am going it is to (drum roll please) Uganda! I am so excited about it. It took me a day to sit with the idea of going over there but I finally have a destination and I am getting very excited about it. My Mom and Dad have been non-stop worrying about me, which is a reasonable reaction. It took some convincing that I would not die in the country but I think they are ok with the idea now. I am going to be working in the city of Kampala. My mother, the amazing woman that she is, is finding everyone who recently moved from Kampala to Toronto and is setting up lunch dates, finding out if they have family in Kampala still, etc. She is also helping me to organize an event with Dr. James Maskalyk . He is doing a book reading at Verity in Toronto on January the 27th. The tickets cost $50 each and that includes the price of the book. If you would like to attend please send me a note and I can put you on the list. There are only 80 tickets, so reserve quickly if you are interested. It should be a great night, so come and support a good cause!
We have just started our term and the first day was day seminar with the Beyond Borders group. We have all gotten together and started to discuss certain aspects of travelling: self-defense, leadership, transit, etc. I’m going to make a wild assumption and assume that everyone who is reading this blog has taken public transit at one time or another in their life time. It is something that we take for granted here. We use it to go to school, work, etc every day but we really don’t give too much thought to. I have moved from Mississauga to Waterloo. Living in Mississauga means that I have taken the Mississauga transit, the TTC and the GO Train. Going from a system like that to a system over here in Waterloo was a bit staggering at first. In Toronto, especially for the subway, if you want to go somewhere you stand in the subway station and wait no more than 10 minutes and ta-da! A subway appears! I am so used to that type of system, when the bus says that it is going to come, it comes. Moving to Waterloo however, was a bit of a change. When I say a bit I really mean a huge change. The buses are always early or late, never on time (and that’s if they even decide to come at all!). Even in this backwards system it is possible to get from point A to point B relatively easily.
Now! Let’s change the scene from a Western industrialized city to a Developing Nation’s city. Hmmmm. There’s a big change. Our professor of the Beyond Borders program was describing to us her journey, or adventure rather, with trying to get from point A to point B when she was in South America. It wasn’t as simple as get on the bus and go there. She had to go from point A to point C to take a boat over to point D then cross back and through to point B but arrived late and had no airplane to get home! I tend to get annoyed when the bus here is 5-10 minutes late, I could not fathom going through that ordeal. It boggles my mind that you would have to go through all of that and that, that isn’t where it ends! I have already had several of those moments where I think to myself, “What the heck did I just get myself into?” It’s like we’re all being sent over and we’re going to be pretty useless at first. Sadly what I can equate it to is the movie Avatar. When the man goes into the whole new system and the woman yells at him “You are like a baby!” I feel like that’s going to be me! I am going to be a baby, needing to learn this whole new system. Well if I don’t learn anything I think I will at least learn patience by the end of the summer.