The Night Before Takeoff

I started this blog to document a lot of the public, and even some of the personal, things that I will experience in Kenya. This blog won't always be grammatically correct nor will it contain proper punctuation in all of my hopefully unpretentious posts. I want this blog to be raw to the fullest extent. An open wound, endlessly flowing with red life. One of the main reasons I decided to go to Kenya is because I want to be able to live again. Not in the sense of a rhythmically beating heart, but living in these sense of being closer to both the inhabitants of the reality that I live in, and the reality itself. During the past few years of my life I have distanced myself from the world that I live in, and I even came to believe that I found solace in that distance. I've done a lot of introspective thinking during these past couple of months. Maybe it has been due to the fact that I have so much free time on my hands since I'm on summer break, or maybe I'm just finally growing up. Don't get my use of the phrase "growing up" mixed with common perception that accompanies it, which I consider to be "growing out." I believe that growing up is when we reach vertical milestones in our lives. Experiences or discoveries that allow us to move upward in our lives, and consciousness of the world, that also allows us to help others' consciousness grow upward as well. On the other hand, I consider "growing out" to consist of spreading our current knowledge and current emotions horizontally that only really affect one singular plane of our existence: getting a job, getting a girlfriend -- acquiring more responsibilities that contribute to our overall consciousness of the world we live in inconsequentially. From the time that I decided I was going to volunteer in Kenya (one month ago), I promised myself that I was going to make a conscious to be a better person. To be genuinely nicer to people (not that fake smile act), and to just calm down overall. I've always done everything so fast in my life: ran fast, thought fast, walked fast, ate fast, succeeded or failed fast. I've realized that I just need to slow down and take time to observe. All of this thinking has caused me to become someone with a more clarified perception of who I was, who I am, and who I really want to be. I know that getting far away to a place I've never been to, such as Kenya, will change me for the better. I've grown up with many misconstrued perceptions of many different things that I am only beginning to shake off now: women, intelligence, religion, fun, people, emotions, and life in general. These are many, but not all, of my reasons for going to Kenya. I don't plan to be the "American Saviour" that will make all of the poor little black African's problems go away. I'm there to observe, understand, and offer whatever I have to give in terms of knowledge and what little life experience I have. I plan to see the deepest shade of black whether it be in the people I encounter or the lands that I see. I'm going to where the deepest shade of black resides.