In Edmonton

This is the first post of what will hopefully be a semi-regularly updated account of my travels to and in Africa.  For those of you who haven't heard anything about this, you are probably in the majority, as the pieces really only fell into place about a week ago.

I am traveling with a group of Hope International (hope-international.com) supporters and employees to Ethiopia for a ten-day tour of the work they are doing there.  We arrive on Friday in Addis Ababa, the capital, with groups flying out of Abbotsford and Calgary.  We will be doing a variety of things over the ten days, including seeing the work that Hope is doing, going on a safari and participating in the 10-km Great Ethiopian Run.  When the rest of the group flies back to Canada, I will be making my way to Madagascar via Johannesburg, South Africa for a six-week internship through Reef Doctor (reefdoctor.org).  This will include community work (such as basic first aid training) and data compilation in the Indian Ocean.  The first two weeks are pretty densely packed, with classroom time devoted to marine biology - which should be interesting given my glaring lack of knowledge in this area - and field work, which basically be numerous dives so that I can become PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) certified and get out in the Mozambique Channel to do data collection.

I have been interested in traveling with Hope on one of their trips to see some of the development work that they are doing for a while.  When I had last talked to Jet Takaoka, one of their development officers, a trip to Sudan in January of 2009 was the most likely time and place that I would be able to join them.  I talked to Jet at a fundraising dinner in Fort McMurray in mid-October, and he said that Sudan didn't look likely, and asked if I was interested in traveling to Ethiopia in November.  Thinking that this gave me a bit more time, I said yes, and then Jet finished laying it out - and the group was leaving in less than a month, not in 2009.  Everything fell into place, but given the price of the trip, I was looking for opportunities to stay overseas a little bit longer than ten days.  I had settled on touring Europe after the Ethiopia trip when I came across an opportunity in an email newsletter called GoAbroad.com.  This was the Madagascar internship, and that only came together in the last week or so.

I fly out of Calgary on Thursday, and land in Ethiopia after a connection in Frankfurt over a day later.  I still need to find a wetsuit.  If you are a 6'5'' diver, you apparently are expected to weigh no less than 215 lbs.  It is unlikely that I will gain 15 lbs before Thursday.  Hmm...