Chelsi Abroad

I’ve officially been home for 3 weeks now.

Yet when people ask me how my semester was, I can’t come up with anything better than “it was awesome!”. How am I supposed to sum up living in another country and all of the experiences I had in ten words or less? And once people start asking specific questions (which is rare), I feel like I can’t shut up because I get excited, but that person either gets bored or starts to feel bad. While talking to one person they told me that they had to end our conversation because I was making them too depressed by talking about my experiences tutoring in a township. I’m not trying to make anyone feel badly when I talk about the negative aspects of life in Africa, but I feel as though I need to share because they were so eye opening for me. I learned so much in the past five, and I’m still learning as I sort through all of my experiences and start to re-adjust to life to U.S. I want to share everything with everyone I talk to, but at the same time I don’t want to come off like I’m bragging or think that I think I’m a better person.

Speaking of re-adjusting, it sucks. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be, and I don’t know how to deal with it. I find myself still living on “African time”. I knew the results of the election in the Democratic Republic of Congo before I knew about the shooting at Virginia Tech. I check the world news online before I even think of checking the local or even national news. It’s not that I don’t care about what’s happening in my own country, I just feel as though there are bigger things happening internationally and I find them more interesting.

It’s really hard to sort out my feelings and thoughts because no one around me has any idea what I’m talking about (hell, I don’t even know what I’m talking about most of the time). Even other people who have studied abroad don’t understand because living in Italy or Australia is nothing like living in Africa. I feel like I’m trapped in this bubble of Central Massachusetts where the biggest problems people my age have are deciding whether to get drunk or stoned before a college concert. 

At our end of the semester party, Mama H said something along the lines of “Africa is in you, it will sneak up on you in the most unexpected places now. Embrace it, love it, and share it.” It didn’t make much sense to me then, but now I’m starting to understand what she meant. 

Saturday, Nov. 12- Sunday, Nov. 13

Saturday morning I had to leave Victoria Falls and my ATC family. After waiting for the transit truck, we said goodbye and I was on my way to the border of Botswana. As soon as we crossed the border we had to wait on the road for 15 minutes because a herd of elephants was crossing. There were a bunch of adorable babies in the herd so I definitely didn’t mind the wait. We stopped to get food and supplies in town then tried to get on our way for the long 12 hour drive, but we got into an accident. There wasn’t any damage to our truck because it’s basically a tank, but the other car’s windshield was completely smashed so we spent the next 2 hours at the police station sorting everything out. We finally got on our way and started driving to Palapye where we would be camping for the night. The drive was extremely bumpy because the one highway we could use was under construction so it was basically a dirt road with boulders in it. We also had to stop a couple of times for disease control checkpoints because there had been a recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease that the government was trying to control. So for each checkpoint we had to get out of the truck with all of our shoes, walk to the guard, dip our shoes into a bucket of disinfectant then wait for the truck as it drove through disinfectant and was searched for contaminated meat. It sounds annoying, but at some points it was kind of nice to get out of the truck and stretch our legs because we only stopped twice all day besides the checkpoints. After about 13 hours of driving, we finally made it to our camp and went to bed right away (who knew riding in a truck all day could be so exhausting).

Sunday morning we left Palapye and continued on our drive to Johannesburg. It was only about an 8 hour drive and it went by pretty quickly. After getting to Jo’burg, I was dropped off at the airport so I could fly back to Cape Town- the only problem was that I was 5 hours early. The wait didn’t turn out to be so bad because I found a Subway to eat some dinner and a hotel in the airport so I could kill some time on the internet. I was all ready to board my flight, and then the lightning started. My flight ended being delayed by an hour and a half, and by the time I got on the plane I was so tired that I slept the entire flight. I got picked up at the airport and driven back to Stellies where I was glad to have an actual bed instead of a sleeping bag.