What It Means to Be from Maine

"I wrote that down, too! Except I wrote, 'We choose peacekeeping over lovemaking' and thought, but that doesn't make any sense!" - Josh King.

Three more weeks, and then -- Africa!

Excitement about Rwanda escalates on an hourly basis. We just got a tentative itinerary from the World Relief leader on the ground, and it looks as if we'll be heading out of Kigali after all. At this point, we'll be traveling down to the Cyangugu province and spending some time along beautiful Lake Kivu. I say it's beautiful because I'm told it's beautiful, but who knows? That might prove to be as false as a certain person's bold assumption that I'm going to be beaten in climbing up a certain 30-foot tree perfectly situated so that one may hurl oneself into the water with reckless abandon and all deliberate speed. This person is delusional, and I openly court his wrath as it is the wrath of a nancy-boy. And I am a pirate. Yarrr.

The team comprises a uniquely disparate group of individuals; and as genuine laughter begins to replace polite banter more often each time we meet, I'm finding that my trepidation dissolves. True, some of the team -- Josh King, Josh Feay, and Captain James van der Beek [see left sidebar; Bryan, update!] -- are old familiars, but I don't know the girls at all. And it's important to know the girls on a trip to the African countryside, I feel. FOR VARIOUS REASONS WHICH WILL NOT BE GONE INTO HERE.

I share this story with you now because I feel it ties into a post made some months ago about being less gross. It's my personal conviction that being less gross is not going to be synonymous with traveling in Africa, and so I may as well get started with the disseminating of rumors about interesting run-ins with dysentery, plumbing disasters, etc. now. I mean, it's already started: at Sunday's team meeting, I was chatting with James, Lara, and Billy about something when I felt (WARNING: the following information requires personal knowledge about the design of female undergarments, to wit, the boycut short) a little creepy-crawly creep and crawl its way from the back of my thigh towards places that I, were I a bug, would never wish to go. I couldn't very well take matters into my own hands at the moment, though, what with Lara mispronouncing Kinyarwandan words and Patty's discussing the fashion faux pas of hiking boots with long skirts. So when the tickling stopped, I assumed it was all in my head and promptly forgot about it until that evening, when I stripped down before bed only to find that one very unfortunate Japanese beetle lost its life somewhere in between the Mongolia-shaped birthmark I have at the base of my spine and the bottom edge of those boycuts. Poor thing.

And I end with another Joshism. As I recounted this tale in the science fiction and fantasy section of Norwalk's Barnes & Noble, Josh turned to me with all solemnity and said the following: "You know what I'm afraid of most about Rwanda? Not the snakes. Not the bugs. Not the gorillas in the mist or the Hutus or the Tutsis or the emotional trauma of it all. I'm afraid I'm gonna forget that I can't handle caffeine and will grab a cup and then have to pee half an hour into a cross-country trip on some Jeep with all of you in it and with no cover in sight. I'm serious."

And he was.