Africa!

Hello, I'm back to the blog after two years (!) away and headed to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for two months as part of my masters.  Has anyone read Heart of Darkness?  That was set on the Congo river, though I would imagine things have since greatly improved.  I'll be in Kinshasa (the capital city) and working with Bon Berger clinic, hopefully doing some program evaluations and possibly helping design others.  It's in the far west of the country (and all of the fighting and whatnot is going on near Goma on the other side, so hurray for that?), and looks like any large city on google images. I'll try to have a post once a week or so, though who knows how realistic that is. I don't know how well the internet is going to work over there, but I'll try my best (and I'm required to write journal entries each week for the program anyway, so might as well do this too).  I'm bringing a centrifuge, a lot of emergency medication and rehydration packets, a lot of cash in very specific bills (I'm probably going to get flagged and "randomly" searched a lot in the airport) and a lot of safari outfits.  I also barely speak the language (and by barely I mean not at all), and have no idea what I'm doing.  It's going to be a grand (mis)adventure, is what I'm saying. To Africa!