Countdown

I'm down to the last two days at my apartment, and I'm using every free moment to finish packing up my place. It has been an extremely tedious task. I'm also down to the last three days of saying goodbye to my friends. Luckily, I'll have a few more days to spend with the family, but saying goodbye is going to be difficult for all of us.

Oh yea.....and I'm also discovering how difficult it is to pack all the items I need w/o going ridiculously over the airline weight max or w/o making my bags so heavy that I can't comfortably carry them. It is also necessary for me to organize my belongings into two categories: "essential and non-essential". The "non-essential" bag needs to be full of items that I won't need during my three months of training, while the "essential" bag stays with me.

I'll spend the latter half of this week on vacation with my family in Florida, and then it's off to Washington D.C. for three days of staging. Once we arrive in Jo'burg next Tuesday, we will travel about an hour and a half north of the capital (Pretoria....I know, I thought it was Jo'burg for the longest times too) to our training site at Marapayne Education Center near the town of Bela Bela in Mpumalanga Province. We'll be assigned to our host families later on in the week, and I'm really looking forward to meeting the people I'll be living with over the next few months. I hope they like the gifts I'm bringing from the States.

We've been informed that we won't have access to internet on a regular basis during training, so we'll be relying mostly on old-fashion communication: writing letters. I'm not sure how often I'll be able to update my blog during training. I'm hoping atleast once a week like I'm doing now, but we'll just have to see.

Oh well....back to packing up my dishes.....till next time......