Day 1: My First Intercontinental Flight

The last month has probably been the most hectic and stressful one of my life. Well, duh. You did just finish your first year in law school after all is the typical response to my observation. People are right. Law school is stressful. But so was college. And high school. And while first semester was pretty stressful, I overall found it to be a lot easier than I expected based on all the horror stories recounted by those who later went on to be amazing academics and famous attorneys. Granted, I did not get a 4.0 so it should have been harder if I had studied more and more thoroughly. Second semester also entailed an additional class and Moot Court briefs and arguments. Still, given my relative success and decent amount of free time during first semester, I thought that second semester would be essentially the same. I could not have been more wrong.

Looking back, it seems as the semester went from struggling to finish all the reading and briefing for class (not even including outlining) to struggling to finish my outlines and memorization of all the concepts and connections I had yet to solidify throughout the semester for four final exams spread out over three weeks to struggling to finish the 10-page memo and footnote edits for the writing competition (and the "postmark date" fiasco that I cannot even begin to explain right now) to frantically trying to pack everything I needed to fly half way across the world by myself to a place I have never been before and where I know not a soul. There were certainly times in class where I felt like I thoroughly grasped (aspects of) the material and moments in the outlining process where the entire subject finally made sense and the connections alluded to earlier seemed so obvious. Of course, I had no time to appreciate these moments because there was always something else on my mind: getting the right shots and meds at the right time, completing my community service hours, interviews with W students, buying gear for climbing Kili (!) and going on safari in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater, etc etc etc.

Even now that I'm on a plane to Rome (after a 1.5 hr flight to DC and a 2hr delay, which may cause me to miss my connecting flight and force me to stay in Addis Ababa for the night instead of the house I booked in Arusha), it still has yet to sink in for me. How did I get here? How did I get through all that? How did P get through all my yelling/rants/sobbing over HUGE PROBLEMS that turned out to be not such big deals after all? And then set in the momentary mini-panic attacks. What the hell am I doing? Why did I think I could do this by myself? Really? - Africa is the first place you choose to travel abroad. ALONE. But then I focus on something - anything - else. Or, better yet, that this isn't all really happening. As if it were no different than if I were simply going home to Vegas for the summer.

As we close in on Rome (4.5 of 9 hrs to go!), I know that I can't call or text mpenzi wangu (MW)(my love :-D) for advice like I just did in DC when I found out that I might be staying overnight in Ethiopia. But Rome will have wireless so I can still email and IM, right? Apparently so does Bole Airport in Addis Ababa. And there are those internet cafes once I finally make it to Arusha. Ugh. I know I have to expect differences but I keep bouncing back and forth between imagining Arusha as desert with no stores or resources to a city not that different than Boston. We'll see how I feel in a few hours. Or after an actual night's sleep (thanks to Red Line, Monster and coffee I've been running on an average of 4 hrs of sleep for more than a week, getting only an hour "last night" (aka: this morning at 6 am) on the plane from Boston to DC).

Before I left, I told MW how anxious/sad/happy/excited I was to be leaving. He told me to write it down because I'll never feel the same combination of feelings again. It's my first time abroad and my first time in Africa. I am super excited about this. However, just like MW said earlier, we always dreamed that my first time here would be with him. Even thinking about climbing Kili without him seems wrong, incomplete. Yet I know that this is really important for me. I'll grow a lot, learn a lot about who I am and what I can accomplish on my own when no one else is there to help. MW keeps saying he has faith in me and I should too - so, here's to hoping and believing that the next three months will be amazing.