Recently received my passport back from the Kenyan embassy. I am now pretty much all set and ready to go in June. I have my visa, I have my tickets, I have a apartment in Nairobi lined up, and funds are starting to come in. This thing is really going to happen. The only thing left to do besides pack is head to the VA to get my vaccinations. Fun times...
I guess I really haven't gotten my head around the fact that I am going to be living in Africa for a year. That's a significant length of time. I remember my first days and weeks in Germany when I was stationed there in 2007. Culture shock. These are different people, with a different language, and different food, and different electricity, all kinds of stuff. And that was Germany: a wealthy, developed, Western country with tons of Americans and military facilities to boot. I imagine the culture shock in Kenya is going to be pretty significant. Oh well, I'm looking forward to it.
It's not to say that the past few months of limbo haven't been useful--I have really learned a lot about life driving a taxi cab 50 hours a week--but I can't help but have slipped into that transitional funk. I keep forgetting that very soon I am going to be practicing international human rights law, working each day to free people facing the highest levels of injustice. It's going to be awesome. But life in the meantime is just as important.
Confession time: Sometimes, driving the taxi, I get a bit frustrated and prideful, thinking to myself, "I went to law school, and now I got to put up with these people..." My average customer is a poor person who doesn't have access to transportation and who cannot fit their travel needs into the rather unaccommodating Madison Metro bus schedule (not everyone in this city works a 9-5 on the square Mr. Bus route planner). All throughout my shift, I enter people's lives for a brief moment and intersect with their situation. I swear that there must be some unwritten rule about the anonymity you have when you get in a cab...people will talk about anything with or in front of a cab driver. It's cool I guess. Your secrets are safe with me Madison.
On the flip side, there are a lot of people in this city that assume that because you are a cab driver, you must be working on finally getting your G.E.D. Like, I picked up this one guy from the airport. He was a super important research biologist at the UW who studied fish or something. He was on his way back from this conference where he and a team of top notch research scientists from around the nation were looking at how to fix some river in Hawaii. I love talking to anyone, but this guy was a specialist, and you should always pick a specialist's brain when you have them captive in your cab for 25 minutes. So I engaged with him in a discussion. He talked to me like I was a child. Although after an engaging discussion of the fishing practices of Quinault Indians and local phosphorus levels in Lake Mendota, he asked me if I was a student at the UW. When I told him I recently graduated law school, his whole tone changed. It was like he was saying, "Oh, you are one of us...the educated, illimuniated ones...here I thought I was talking to a member of the unwashed masses."
Anyway, so at times I have to be on guard for thinking pridefully about who I am and what I am above or beneath doing. I also see it in others too though, the assumptions we make about those we come into contact with. If anything this three-month foray into the world of driving taxi has been a good lesson in humility and the importance of not linking together who we are (our identity) with what we do to get money.
