Pre-trip anxiety and all that good stuff

Ok, just a brief caveat before I begin. So the attempt here is to make this blog 'non-academic', but, given that I have spent the last 10 months writing-what is to me-an insane amount of academic papers, I am finding it more difficult to follow this rule than I thought.

I am leaving in 4 days. 4 DAYS! This past month has seriously flown by. Fortunately, I was able to share a celebratory goodbye with my friends and family and fit in most of the necessary farewells. I have come to realize that when leaving, one can never say goodbye to everyone (like your best friend from high school, or your former colleague etc..), and when it comes to the people you love the most, you can never say good bye enough. It always seems inadequate.

On another note, the past week has been both an exciting process of growth and sharing as well as a bureaucratic nightmare. The exciting aspect refers to the surprisingly interesting intercultural learning workshop that I participated in earlier this week. I assumed we'd spend the three days tediously reviewing the classic CIDA do's and don'ts. But it was actually more open and progressive than that. We discussed many of the serious issues with historic methods of international development (albeit vaguely), touching on privileged knowledges, scientific method, and last but not least, colonization. Again none of these issues were discussed in-depth, but for a CIDA led program, I was pleased that the facilitator expressed the need to keep these issues at the forefront of our mind and our work.

I will not bring down the excitement by getting into all the bureaucratic irritations. Essentially, it was a lot of unnecessary running around, documenting, form-filling etc...
Thankfully, I am now able to do academic research while I am there. This required much more paperwork than one would assume (risk assessments, ethics reviews, research summaries). I do intend to get a little into my research on this blog, but I will not bore you with the details. If it gets to be too much, than I may start an alternative blog specifically for that purpose.

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about where I am going and what I am doing, none of which seem easy for me to delineate. Thus, I will leave that for later.

Anyways, after all is said and done, I must now spend the last few days tying together the final loose ends and spending time doing all the things I will miss so much once I'm gone...which won't be blogging ;) So, I will return to you when I arrive.