Jambo!

I have always respected my parents advice. I have always done my best to heed it. This summer has been exceptionally challenging in that respect. The advice they were pouring out to me, felt more like a dare than anything else.
Lauren, I dare you to just SIT STILL. Stop making plans. Go ahead, try it, you might like what happens.
My mom tells me, let life happen to you for once.
And that sort of thing, kinda, makes my skin crawl.

Let life happen?! Are you out of your MIND?! What about, following my dreams? What about planning my next move? What about all these massive, weighted, decisions I have to make? A job, a car, an apartment, school, where and when and better yet how??

I laughed so hard when I first heard this Mitch Hedberg joke. I was in my kitchen in Boulder, cooking something remniscient of stir-fry (a.k.a. throwing what I had, in a pan, and adding peppers) and I had to stop and double over for a minute. He says, "You know what, I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just gonna find out where they're going, and I'll catch up with them later." (Granted, if you know Mitch, his delivery is the most key part of his performance, something I can not express here.) I just remember thinking, god do I know exactly what he means.
Following my dreams often turns into diving head first and blind into a giant situation, bigger than me, and having to claw at the sides to get myself on top again. Something like cliff jumping. You're up real high, you're so excited and anxious, you make the jump, the fall is exhilerating and then your in some deep, dark, unknown waters where you immediately kick and flail feverishly so as not to touch the murky bottom, and to breathe in the safety of the oxygen that awaits you.

No? Is that just me?

Anyway, I decided this summer, I would listen to Mitch, and my mom and my dad. Which is, by the way, extremely hard to do when your circle of best friends could have crawled directly out of a Kerouac novel into your back yard. The Beats of Bristol....the Bristol Beats. They're constantly flooding the mind with big adventures, enormous ideas and hashing out possible solutions. Which, is the most amazing thing I could have ever been blessed with in my life. But...is not conducive to sitting still. Especially sitting still in Bristol, in a "corporate" job...at your parents house.
My heart hurt to make this transistion in, while all of my friends, were transitioning out.

But I sat. And I sat. And I fought anxiety attacks that begged me to move. To pack a bag, to get a map, to make a plan. I sat and sat. I sat over coffee, on porches, in my cubicle.
And my mom was right. Life did start just happening around me. New friends waltzed into my life, plans erupted filling up weekends months ahead of time, jobs started appearing, I found myself happy with my new roommates - mom and dad. And then this. Then the biggest. Then the adventure poked its head in on my comortable, still, life.

I am going to Africa next summer. I am more excited than I have been for anything in long time. My friend Lindsay was signed up to go with this non-profit organization called American Friends of Kenya (http://www.afkinc.org/index.asp). She had met the Director, Emely, and was asked to join their team as the photographer. Lindsay told Nick and I about this, told Emely about us, and then we applied. The team was already full, so we were waitlisted, but bumped to the top of the list. Months went by, my hopes for getting a call started to deflate. I started to feel that bug, that travel bug, nibbling at me, telling me if I am not going to Africa through them that I should be looking into something else.

But this organization just felt so right. It's based in Norwich, CT and is 100% volunteer-run. They build libraries, ship school and medical supplies, run micro-economic projects, and run training programs for youth with computers and technology. Then they travel to Kenya for two weeks every summer, to meet with their Kenya partners, give the volunteers a chance to see what they are working for, run medical check ups and build other projects that the locals have deemed necessary.

Then I get the totally unexpected call from Emely asking me if I am still interested in joining their 2008 team. I almost screamed in her ear like the people on the radio that win tickets to the 50 Cent show.

So I will be going, along with Lindsay and 60 other people, to Kenya for two weeks. The first week we will be working on a media project on how they will be installing solar powered toilets in the slums of Kenya. The second week is spent traveling with the group to National Parks and other villages. Then, there is a chance that Lindsay and I, with the assistance of Emely and AFK, will travel on our own to other parts of Kenya, and possibly other East African countries such as Tanzania.

Africa has been a dream for so long. One that has been tugging on my heart relentlessly ever since I got swept up in the Invisible Children work. Ever since I have been so passionately intrigued by te culture, the people, the clothes and music, the food, the lifestyle, the poverty, the war and the resiliant personalities there. The letters from Emely already have me at the edge of my seat, grinning ear to ear. She says to be prepared to be traveling in a Third World country, be prepared to roll with the punches, anything could happen, anything could change. Be prepared that, we are not traveling on vacation, we will not be guarded from the slums, from the extreme poverty, we will be right there in it.
It couldn't sound more perfect.

So, my mom and dad win again. I sat still, and allowed myself to be distracted with the smaller, enjoyable things in life, like porch nights, grilled food, barefeet in the parks of Hartford, CT, and one of my bigest dreams found me.

This will be a whole new saga of negotiating with chaos, starting now. The planning has already begun, the travel bug is alive and well and nipping me in the best way possible, I feel alive and young and that passion is bubbling up again. That passion that calls on me to go big, do more, live full of love. See it all, learn it all, do it all.

And I know I can't. But that push to try is one of the most refreshing, exhilerating feelings in the world.