Light at the End of the Tunnel

It is the dawn of a new age. My roommate moved out today (her stuff is still living here, her dog is still living here, but she has officially moved in with friends about fiteen minutes down the road and will no longer be leaving wads of gum in the sink and on the counter, not buying her share of the toilet paper, and smoking inside instead of on the balcony like we agreed). It will be more expensive living alone (not exactly alone since I still have the puppy until at least mid-July when she moves to Mexico) but well worth the calm and quiet of returning to only the manageable amount of mess I create, paying for my expenses and no one elses, getting to choose what stupid movies to watch on TV, etc.

Sadly, I got a little more alone-ness than I wished for, as my brother is moving out this week too. He finally got the green light to head to the village of Marial Bai in Southern Sudan, the hometown of Valentino Achak Deng, refugee and hero of Dave Eggers' amazing book What is the What. To get there, he must first fly to Nairobi, where the Southern Sudanese Consulate will (hopefully) grant him a travel permit (the visas you can get to visit North Sudan are worthless for entering the South). He will spend a few days to a week in Kenya until he meets up with Valentino himself, who will fly with Thomas to Juba, Sudan. From Juba, they will take a UN charter flight to Aweil, basically an empty field in Southern Sudan and then make the trek to Marial Bai by as-yet-unknown ground transportation.

The school where he will be volunteering to teach newly hired and untrained Sudanese teachers classroom management, lesson planning, curriculum strategy, etc. just started last week and they are still building the dorm they have planned to draw more young female students to the school. Parents who otherwise might give their daughters into early marriages could afford to consider education instead of the girls' accomodations would be provided for in the dorm, which had also hired a dorm mother to act as a role model and parent to the girls.

In addition to his teaching duties, Thomas may get to help build the dorm and he'll be sleeping in a hut that Greg, the guy in charge of coordinating his trip and communcations with Valentino, built with his own two hands on his last trip to Sudan. So, little by little the school's infrastructure will build up and Thomas' impact on the teachers and students who will fill the classrooms and bedrooms will hopefully be even more permanent and long-lasting than the buildings themselves.

Forgive me the advertising, but he does have to pay all his flights and his stay in Nairobi on either end of the trip out of his own pocket so if anyone wants to support him on his adventures, you can donate to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation and specifically earmark the funds for Thomas by using this link: http://www.valentinoachakdeng.org/pledgedrive_maffai.php

I will be sad to see him go and biting my nails down to nubbins while he is out of all communication taking malaria pills that cause hallucination and possibly epilepsy, and isn't getting his yellow fever vaccine because finding the vaccination center in Cairo sounds "complicated," but I am glad he will have this life experience and have the chance to positively impact the lives of so many others. Also, after eight weeks, he will no longer be living on my floor. So there's something to that to be sure.

At work, I feel I have finally turned a corner. I am still working on the same case, of course, but I am getting different tasks every few weeks, none of which I like or find interesting, because that is the way of construction law, but at least now I am doing a variety of boring things instead of just one really, really boring thing. I will get to start drafting hopefully as early as next week and I am doing this monstrous job now where I spend each day going through five enormous notebooks page by page, comparing each sheet to an Excel spreadsheet, which seems to have nothing to do with the pages it is supposedly coordinated with. Awesome.

So after this week, when Thomas leaves, Marisol is gone, and it is just the dog and I at home, and I finally start doing something at work that requires more than a high school education and basic secretarial skills, I will have a better idea of what life will be like for me here for the rest of my stay (however long that may be...hello? US economy? Are you listening?). I am excited. A little nervous. I know I'll be lonely without a full house but hopefully it will push me to make more friends and get out more often. And, I'll have more room for GUESTS!

If Egypt would only start selling microbrews, life would be perfect...except...I'd still be in Egypt.