johannesburg

moved to johannesburg yesterday... officially, i'd been planning this trip for about 2 weeks. i'd been thinking about it for much longer. originally i was going to come down last november but veered off to the camp instead. a few weeks back though, all my ducks got in a row and, here i am.

its been a bizarre 24 hours. beyond different accents, it doesn't feel much like ive left north america. kitchener, sure.. johannesburg is a lot bigger. but we're in a pretty quiet area that at night could easily be mistaken for claremont ave.

go figure.

it feels right though.

before i left, a friend mentioned that i wouldn't be going to africa. i got all annoyed. of course johannesburg is africa. the continent is a place, not an idea, and certainly not a stagnant image of rural lives built around mudhuts and large animals. sure enough though, my first thought when i got off the plane was that i most certainly was not in africa anymore. we touched down in dakar, senegal. that seemed right. this was way off.

what i can tell from the get go is that this is about to challenge every idea and understanding i've come to normalize about the continent. i certainly haven't been visiting this continent for long but my role as an international volunteer in slightly rural settings with a history of IVs coming through certainly paints a certain picture of "the continent". despite all my DEVS teaching against homogenization, i seem to have done just that.

live and learn?