C, F, L, R

Currently en route to Cameroon — this is the first leg of the 18-hour trip, which is American Airlines to Brussels with a three-hour layover before a Belgium Air flight to Yaoundé. Readers are encouraged to price these flights (Thursday overnight into Friday; Friday morning) and report their findings. All comments will be lovingly read but sorry, we can’t write personal responses to each letter.

I currently hypothesize that part of the reason we got up at 6am was so we could sleep on the flight, to try to helpfully transition us around jet lag. But I think I’m so exhausted that it doesn’t really much matter. Naturally, I can’t sleep. On the upside, I’m vaccinated against yellow fever. (Expect my taste in women to change.) I was reading for a while Gus’s copy of "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" (which, hey! I also spilled water on), but now the lights are off and I don’t want to disturb anyone. For a while I was keeping myself amused, or at least confused, by trying to translate GMT offsets and landing times in my head (we set our watches to in-country time before we left). So now I’m writing this on my phone (which seems to have a much better battery life in offline mode). It’s currently 10:14PM EDT, and 3:14AM in Brussels.

Another reason we had so much time was to handle crises like Elizabeth A. getting sick at the airport. Current thinking is that it’s a reaction to her vaccination. A hospital came to get her. She is staying at Jamaica Hospital overnight and hopefully the Organization will be shipping her out tomorrow. So now our travel group of 43 is only 42. More about them: our group is maybe 30% male, mostly Education with some Small Enterprise Development, and has at least 6 Computer Literacy assignees with varying skills (including one EE). My favorites so far are the older ones. I ate lunch with ladies who are 32 and 36, plus there’s the married one I mentioned last time. One co-worker brought a guitar, though he doesn’t know how to play, saying "I’ll have plenty of time to practice!" (I have LSDJ on my DS, of course.) At least two are fairly openly homosexual (including the one with the guitar, which he says he borrowed from his boyfriend), and one other has a rainbow on her luggage.

I didn’t even try to get a non-dairy meal on the airplane, choosing instead to pick out bits of one of the options. I think I need to speak with the Organization’s travel agency and ask them to make this work better for me in the future.

From time to time I get a shot of terror, that I’m completely unprepared or lost, but I control these by telling myself that I’m flying in a plane, which I’ve done before, and that an experience only has as much meaning as you allow it to have. I learned from college that I don’t have a lot of allowance that way. Take that, cultural relativism.

Lastly: at least three other people here have read "And You Fall Down". I played tour guide on the bus through Brooklyn. It makes sense that we fly out of JFK because he founded the Organization. I found a grommet on the airport floor, but it wasn’t mine. Perhaps Gus will be pleased to know that one of our 43 is named Janelle. And a no-fee passport looks exactly the same as a normal "feed" one, just with a sticker on the front.

Staging is done now; tomorrow it’s immunizations and then off to JFK to fly out. I’m taking notes on pen-and-paper again. I spent a half-hour saving pages of the Icehouse wiki as PDFs. The Organization pretty much out-and-out forbids you from writing anything that is negative about the Organization or the country you’re serving, which rubs me the wrong way. I was going to go through the old posts and remove tho country’s name to crudely hide from Google, but hey, there it is in the domain name. Guess I’ll have to robots.txt that bitch before someoene stumbles on this.

Spoke at dinner with a lady whose Swedish husband of 26 years is waiting for her back home, and another lady whose relatively new boyfriend is also. The Peace Corps keeps statistics — “We don’t know why, but for married couples of which only one goes to serve, there is a divorce rate of about 40%”. Scary stuff when your girlfriend is as awesome as mine. The other lady said something like “Actually I kind of like knowing that he’s there. Because after Peace Corps you’re so different, you won’t know what kind of place you’ll want to live in, you won’t know what you’ll want to do, but before I left I wanted to make a life with this guy and I haven’t felt that way in a long time. So to know that I have something nice to look forward to coming home to, that makes me feel good.” The married lady suggested letter-writing as a means to keep romance alive. I have 19 stamps and no envelopes. Please send help.

Otherwise, it’s a lot like college — printed materials, stupid getting-to-know-you games, and the promise of an environment different from any you’ve seen so far.

Turns out you can brush your teeth without toothpaste, but it sucks. Got away with shampooing/conditioning with much less material thanks to my mighty girlfriend’s hair-trimming skills.

I was up a little later than perhaps I should have been and consequently had a hard time getting out of bed. My luggage are each 1-3 lbs over the limit (also: 0.5-1.5 kg). I probably would have stayed awake longer, trying to put more of my digital life in order, except that my wonderful girlfriend was in bed and it became increasingly difficult to resist holding her.

This morning I got a bit of a late start and (after trying to desperately pack some clothes — I still forgot t-shirts) staggered out the door. Big thanks to my amazing girlfriend, without whom I probably would have just given up, thrown the luggage in the river, and gotten a job at IBM. Amtrak’s people surlily (is that a word?) transmuted my ticket into another ticket — when they asked whether I wanted to take the train in 5 minutes or the one in 10 minutes, I said the later one because I just wanted to spend more time with her. God, and now I’m crying on the train, although not as bad as at the gate — I really bawled my eyes out. Getting soft in my old age, I guess.

Got selected for a random security screening. Made me feel no safer but glad they weren’t racially profiling. Still have no idea where I’m going once I get to Philadelphia. I’m going to miss you guys.

Just threw the clothes I was wearing into the laundry and then streaked back up to my room naked. The goal is to make sure I don’t leave any festering dirty clothes. I am probably overthinking this, as I have overthought everything else.

Today I spent a little while looking for Icehouse pieces, figuring that they’re worth their weight in entertainment value (and particularly so I could play/teach Kaxxt). I figured I really needed to get a few stashes, but they don’t sell them as stashes any more. Instead they come as sets of a playable game called Treehouse, which by luck I found a single copy of at a local store. But somehow only one stash doesn’t seem flexible enough for me, and I’m sincerely considering making more Icehouse pieces out of paper (also: did you know there’s a thing called the piecepack?). Of course, I’ll also need to print out all the rules for all the games I can play. Wait.. shouldn’t I be studying French or something?

I also bought a copy of Set. Everyone loves Set, whether they love it or not. Remember: these games are to encourage abstract thinking. Yes.

You can find a valid form for granting power of attorney in New York State in the New York State General Obligations Laws, title 15 section 5-1513. (Or just go to the Consolidated Laws of New York State page and click General Obligations, and then title 15 or whichever one says”Power of Attorney”.) You also need to file a separate power of attorney for the IRS and one for New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. Some of these need to be witnessed by a notary public, but the signature of you (the principal) and the person you designate (the agent) need not be done at the same time.

Impulse bought today: a Cowon D2+ (personal music player: a little pricey as far as these things go, but rated for 52 hours of music playback, and supports OGG and FLAC) and a Aluratek Libre (e-ink reader: fairly inexpensive as far as these things go, and relatively small/lightweight, and I’m a sucker for anything named “Libre”). Both devices seem capable of charging via USB. I also went shopping for bug spray. The lady behind the counter advised me that a typical usage pattern involves putting on spray in the morning and in the evening, roughly corresponding to a bottle of spray per person per week. That corresponds roughly to 116 bottles of bug spray — not logistically feasible, even a little bit. My new game plan: lots of long clothing.

A part of me recognizes that I’m planning according to fear, and that most of the thing I’m bringing I’m not going to ever use or need. That doesn’t make me any less afraid, but it does put things into perspective. I just hope I haven’t crossed the 80 lbs limit for checked luggage yet (of which my actual suitcases probably take up 15 lbs..).

So there you go.  Hope all that helps. Really, there’s no need to stress as you can either find things you forget here or have them shipped from home.  Good luck with everything, and see you all when you get here.

This is from the packing guide I got by email (as part of a nine-.doc email). Packing has been something of a focus for me over the last few weeks; it’s a little late to say “there’s no need to stress”, especially since I’ve seen four Organization-endorsed packing lists already.

On the other hand (d’un autre côté), this advice is probably pretty sage. There’s no way to prepare for something like this. You can buy things in an attempt to make yourself feel better (as I have), but since you don’t even know where in the country you’re going to go, you’re trying to predict something unknowable. I’m trying not to stress, but the entire Organization process so far has been almost designed to produce stress, from badly-designed forms to arbitrary processes and incoherent instructions demanding answers to obscure and invalid questions. It’s kind of hypocritical to turn around and say “It’ll be fine! Don’t worry!..”

Asian-American Volunteers are often considered Chinese even when they have a different ethnic origin. They may also be assumed to be martial arts experts and asked to demonstrate their expertise.

This is in the “welcome book”, which serves as an introduction to the country I will be serving in. I found the above pretty funny — “oh, so it’s going to be just like home then?”

The subject is relatively new in Cameroon. Most schools do not yet have computers, so teaching this subject will take lots of creativity.

About a month ago I got my assignment. The above is a quote.

I leave in less than a week. Of course, the story begins over a year ago when I started the application process for the Organization. Unfortunately I didn’t think to start a blog then.

I have taken to carrying my assignment with me, just to show the above sentence. It’s a little nervewracking — so much so that I impulse-bought another netbook, “just in case”.