On the ground...

When traveling under the Firm’s security blanket, it’s very easy to be nonchalant about snafus. If there is a flight delay or if you miss your plane, if a ticket counter gives you troubles or a taxi driver gets lost, it will be dealt with. The biggest problem you’ll encounter as a result is a meeting done by phone instead of in person or a cranky manager wondering why you are late. As a result, the need to worry about what you cannot change is minimal – there is an express help hotline and corporate card to change things for you if you call.

Traveling on your own to unknown places is quite different. Travel becomes a series of hurdles in a 100M race, each one as dangerous and looming as the first. Will they ticket my connection? Will my baggage make it through? Will I get a visa? Will someone be waiting on the other side? The answer is generally yes, and the travel smarts you’ve picked up in the past are just as helpful here. Without the armor of the business suit, however, you can look, and feel, as the grandmother on safari informs you on the plane, barely old enough to be working for anyone.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that no matter how often you travel, going somewhere new and different is always scary. But, I am safely arrived in Kenya, and settling in. I landed at night, so was unable to see the city by air. As we drove in from the airport, on the wrong side of the road, I got a sense of a sprawling, industrial city, with public parks and industrial buildings giving way to a city center of skyscrapers and then into the expat suburbs, where I’ll be living and working. I’m in a little apartment with another VolCon or two – all the comforts of home, give or take a few (water rationing, power outages, mosquito nets).

The feel of the area reminds a bit of some of the less-recovered eastern block cities I visited during the obligatory post-college back-packing tour, except more lush, green and with more animals. The birds are chirping outside my window as I write (took today to recover from jetlag and settle in before beginning work tomorrow), and Judy, who does our laundry, is singing in Swahili in the washing room next door.

It is worth mentioning that this area is quite westernized. 20 minutes after arriving, L. and R. had whisked me out the door to see Terminator: Salvation at the move theater next door and meet some of the other VolCons. After two days of travel, watching Christian Bale randomly blow up machines for two hours was quite therapeutic.