5/27/2017
Well, it's Saturday morning, I've just taken the last sip of my coffee and I was reading some old blog posts when I thought, "I'm going somewhere new, I should blog about it." For those of you who don't know, I'll be heading to Liberia in 12 days. I'm interning with the Carter Center which is situated in the capital, Monrovia. I don't necessarily want to tell y'all what I'm doing because something that I did in the Peace Corps was have expectations for myself that turned out to be unreasonable. This time around, I want to get there and just go with the flow.
But, instead of having expectations, I want to set some intentions for myself. A friend of mine, Jason, asked me something before I left for the Peace Corps that I dismissed fairly quickly but in retrospect I wish I'd considered it more carefully. He asked me, "What do you want to get out of this? (the Peace Corps)" At the time, I made some joke and forgot about it. What I didn't realize at the time is that working in humanitarian aid abroad is a mutualistic relationship, the people I work with get something from me but I also get something from the people. I need to consider what is it that I want to get out of this trip as much as what I want to give.
Now, I don't know what I can give, that may be limited by what the Carter Center has available for me so for now I'm disregarding that half of the question. What I want for myself are the following things;
1. Become as integrated as I can - I want to lose my fear of interacting with people and challenge myself to talk to new people every day. I only have two months and I want to meet as many people as I can.
2. Record as much as I can - When I was in Guyana, I had the odd blog post and posted the odd picture but this time around I want to really document as much of the experience as possible. This serves a double purpose, as I've been doing research it's difficult to get a sense of the culture that isn't sensationalized or coming from a particular angle. I want to be able to document activities and events around me unfiltered.
So that's it, it may change before I leave but that's what I'm thinking this morning. Every day I'm going to meet someone new and record something. That's the plan at least. Until next time, feel free to email me at timdaniel25@gmail.com.
