Well, dear readers (if I have any left, ha!), I'm about to go on the adventure I've worked towards my whole life. My boss and friend at The 100 Friends Project, Marc Gold, has given me the opportunity to spend a month with him, traveling around Southeast Asia helping dispense aid to the people we help. In 2 weeks from right now, I will be in Tokyo, on my way to Bangkok. From Bangkok, I will go to Vietnam for a week, then to Cambodia for at least week. After that, the details are a little sketchy, but I hope to also go to Indonesia while I'm in the neighborhood. Every step of the way, I'll be meeting people whose lives have been or will be touched by the 100 Friends Project. I am so thankful and excited! Already on the agenda is distributing wheelchairs in Hanoi, teaching orphans in Phnom Penh, visiting Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, doing yoga on a beach in Thailand, fulfilling a childhood dream of going to Angkor Wat and hopefully joining my friend Dwight at his program, In Search of Sanuk, helping street kids in Bangkok. I am stoked!
But I'm also pretty scared.
I've never left the United States before. I don't speak Thai, Vietnamese or Khmer. I have never been to a tropical climate. I have freaking malaria pills packed in carry-on. MALARIA PILLS! I never thought I'd ever go to place where I need would need malaria pills! And this is the point in my inner monologue where I begin to question my sanity. Who the hell am I to be doing this? I'm nobody. I'm just a little country girl from a tiny little Midwestern town nobody has ever heard of. I have health problems and no one else in my immediate family have ever traveled abroad. My dad died without ever having left the continental United States. People like me just don't get to do things like this.
And yet, here I am, with a ticket to Thailand, a Vietnamese visa and those malaria pills.
Somebody pinch me, ya'll, because this is just weird.
