Boy Meets Blog

Remember the Boy Meets World episode when Corey and Topanga are on their honeymoon? They go to an exotic paradise of some kind (Hawaii, perhaps?) and Corey doesn’t want to leave. Ever. So they stay. Of course, by the end of the thirty minutes, with sufficient commercial break-age, he realizes vacation ceases to be such when it becomes perpetual. Topanga misses “home.” Tropical paradise became less exotic.

I look up at the trees here and remember (an incessant theme in my blog, perhaps) I’m in East Africa. Palm and banana leaves swept across the sunset outside Josephine Tucker (my dorm) and I didn’t notice until I looked at pictures. I often let this “exotic” escapade fall into mere school and life. I think of Corey and Topanga realizing how far vacation is from reality, and wonder if this experience will persist in the reality I am bound to re-enter in a mere two months.

Then I realize that Topanga’s name is Topanga. Where did that name come from and why did it take until now for me to realize its, well, weird?

Last Saturday I flew through the air over a Class 5 white water rapid called “Big Brother” when our raft flipped. Our instructor, Roberto, had never flipped a raft on that rapid in his six years of experience on the Nile. The next day I watched several USP students bungee jump 140ft, dipping their upper halves in the Nile as they climaxed (div-axed?) their initial decline. The jump is free if you do it naked. No one took the offer last weekend, but apparently it’s not a rare occurrence for the boaters below to hand the jumper a towel for modesty as they take the straps off their ankles.

In two days we leave for rural home stays. As Uganda’s population is 80% rural, it seems next week will be my first interaction with “typical” Uganda. I was told I will probably be in a hut, sleeping on a floor. I will definitely not have electricity or running water. I may be 30-45 kilometers from the nearest white person. Here I go…