Bear With Me

I'm asking for your forgiveness and understanding in advance: this is about to be the cheesiest blog post ever, but I have to write it anyway. After a week in the office busying myself with different projects and continuing to get used to how things work around here, we were let off a little bit early on Friday. I decided to go for a quick jog around our neighborhood and ran down the long road that stretches from our house to what is literally the bush - not a single house, dirt roads stemming from the central concrete road, and I wouldn't be surprised if I saw some sort of animal there. The pervasive red Lusakan dust was kicked up with every step I took, and Shakira's "This Time for Africa" came on my iPod. My shadow was 35-feet tall with the blazing orange sun spreading across the horizon and setting behind me, Zambians coming home from work, from school, from somewhere else, walking next to me, and it finally hit me. I'm in Africa. I was taken back to when I returned my little Civic right before I left and the same song came on the radio - a world away right now, but connecting between the two locations anyways. It was my "Aha!" moment, my "holy shit I'm in Africa" moment, my "I know this is disgustingly cheesy but it's too special to ignore" moment.