Orientation

Saturday morning my roommates drove me to the airport and I flew to DC. I shortly found myself wishing they could have come with me as the theme of the crossword puzzle in the Hemispheres magazine was supervillians. I'm sure they would have thought of Juggernaut and Sabretooth way before I did.

Orientation was at Wellspring, a retreat in the woods of Maryland. I met my fellow travelers, Red and John going to Burundi as well as the workcampers heading for Rwanda and Kenya. There are a lot of teachers and students which makes sense when you think about who'd have a month free in the summer. We range in age from 18 to 62, are from the West Coast, Midwest, the Northeast and Canada. Dave Zarembka who runs the AGLI program says this years group is a good mix age wise and the gender breakdown is pretty typical. That'd be mostly women. I think there are 15 of us total, 4 men, 11 women. We played a few ice breaker games and then got down to the business of learning what to expect in the coming month. There will be a lot of cultural differences to prepare ourselves for, issues of gender roles, money and history. We were very grateful to have Anna, a workcamper from 2005, come and tell us first hand about her experiences.

Monday the people going to Rwanda & Kenya flew out leaving me, Red and John waiting for our Wednesday night flights. My brother and his wife kindly agreed to put up Red and I for Monday and Tuesday and will be taking us to the airport in just a few hours. Yesterday my brother's wife Nikki took off work and showed us around DC. We visited the WWII memorial which I'd never seen and walked up to the Lincoln Memorial, always a favorite of mine. I was struck again by the eloquence of the two speeches which are inscribed on the walls of the monument. You know there are people who speak dismissively of how Barak Obama is 'just' a speechmaker but I couldn't help thinking as I read the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's 2nd inaugural not just of the comfort and inspiration people must have taken from those words at the time but how those words have come to define our ideals as a nation. It is not nothing to have a president capable of crafting words in a way that resonates beyond the moment of a particular speech. How long has it been since we've had a national leader whose words you could imagine someday being carved in stone? Words are never 'just' words.

After lunch we went to the National Archives, where I've also never been, and filed past the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I do wonder what we will write to match them. Sacred as I hold them myself, I worry that we as a nation are too content to let ourselves stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before. We saw several motorcades, apparently a common occurence in DC including one for officials from North Vietnam who were visiting the US for the first time since before the Vietnam War.

This afternoon we're going to take a little stroll around Great Falls National Park and then head for the airport. We fly out tonight to Ethiopia via Rome and will arrive in Addis Ababa tomorrow evening. The following morning we fly to Bujumbura. Here we go!