Bängala!

In twenty days I will be driving toward the Washington Dulles Int'l airport. KLM Royal Dutch Airline will welcome my modest packages and I will climb aboard their aircraft, from which I will take aerial pictures of the capital's lights and then compare them with those of Amsterdam. Then I'll take a brief hiatus from flying to wonder if Entebbe will have light.

Not only does today mark 20-days-pre-departure; I also finished my first USP assignment and am halfway through my vaccinations. My left arm is incredibly sore from a tetanus shot, muting my right arm's Yellow Fever ache. Tetanus, Diphtheria, and Yellow Fever are done, as well as my TB test. Friday is Hepatitis A and Polio. Hallelujah for Malaria and Typhoid pills.

My first assignment was a book much of my family and extended family passed around a few years ago, but I somehow missed. Kingsolver received rave reviews, including the New York Times Bestseller list for The Poisonwood Bible and it was a worthy first assignment. I'll leave you with one such worthy quote:
"I rock back and forth on my chair like a baby, craving so many impossible things: justice, forgiveness, redemption. I crave to stop bearing all the wounds of this place on my own narrow body. But I also want to be a person who stays, who goes on feeling anguish where anguish is due. I want to belong somewhere, damn it. To scrub the hundred years' war off this white skin till there's nothing left and I can walk out among my neighbors wearing raw sinew and bone, like they do" (474).