I'm currently at London Heathrow waiting for my connecting flight to Lusaka, Zambia. The gate for the flight hasn't even been assigned yet so I haven't met anyone on the team.
Everyone around me has been really excited for my trip to Africa, but the truth is I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it. This is definitely something that I want to do, but I never thought of it as anything particularly daring or a brave undertaking.
I don't really know what to expect from a place that I have heard so much about yet know very little of. When I was young, Africa was a land of lions and giraffes on Discovery Channel. Then I heard about the famine in Ethiopia and the Rwanda Genocide, and Africa became a land of darkness. I learned more about what goes on in this piece of faraway land, Africa became a mysterious juxtaposition of beauty and turmoil, a land sought after and forgotten, and a place that is supposed to transform you when you set foot in it.
There's always something different in the way people talked about Africa, the sound of it when someone says the word. "You're going to Africa? What are you doing in Africa?" And the pause after is always longer than pauses after any other word. I don't know what it is, but maybe people want to make sure that they don't sound offensive, or too assuming, or too ignorant. Africa brings to mind something complex, incomprehensible. And maybe I will find out on this journey, what people mean when they say "Africa". (I'd also like to point out how often Africans countries are blended into a collective whole, as if one country is just the same as another. So I guess what I really mean is just what Zambia is, or what the tiny village two hours away from Lusaka is.)