When we first starting talking about Africa, I don’t think either of us really considered all the work that goes into planning a trip. There is a lot of stuff you need to know… and finding that information is stressful. For example, locating a program to take two nursing students to Africa was hard. We had to get our google on and try to comb through companies that we thought were a scam and find ones that sounded legit. We found a program that seemed pretty sweet and we decided to just go for it. Kiri and I jumped right in, not fearing the least when a scary waiver form told us all about how the company was not liable for any events of civil unrest, terrorism, volcanic eruptions, natural disasters, or kidnapping. We basically died laughing at the idea of us getting caught in a war in Africa and signed the waiver without giving it too much thought. 4 days later, on a sunny morning in May, we received a phone call from the United Kingdom saying that we’d been accepted to a 3 week nursing placement in Ghana! This resulted in many caps-locked text messages, screaming, and leaping up and down, thus marking the beginning of this crazy journey.
So where are we at today? Well, we’re just under 6 months away from the biggest adventure of our lives and we’ve been planning up a storm. Yesterday we went on an adventure to the humane society and Kiri adopted another cat. Being animal lovers, we spent about an hour and a half playing with every animal in sight. I fell in love with a dog that I’m not allowed to have and almost cried because he was just so full of love (I’m a big softie when it comes to dogs haha). We also visited every single cat and I attempted to befriend the feline population again (I haven’t been successful yet; cats just don’t like me… they’re solely Kiri’s domain). Anyways, I promise all this has relevance to Africa because after adopting Casper, we went home to Kiri’s house and did some research about the immunization requirements for Ghana. We had a serious in-depth discussion about whether we should get rabies shots or not. I thought it was funny at first, and joked about turning into rabid animals but have you ever read what happens to you if you get rabies? YOU DIE. THERE IS NO CURE PEOPLE. And after being forced into watching that awful Old Yeller movie in elementary school, rabies just seems perfectly terrible and I don’t want it...but the rabies vaccine is expensive and we’re a couple of starving students who can barely afford our Tim Horton’s addictions, let alone some pricey immunizations. So this might just be an “I’ll take my chances” kind of deal… Which I know makes us sound like the world’s biggest hypocrites, especially being nursing students and all, but we’re just not sure yet.
Last night we also made some headway into what our journey is going to look like post-Africa. We’ve decided that if we’re already on that side of the Atlantic, we might as well make the most of that opportunity and do some travelling before making our way back home to Canada. Trying to decide a route through countries has been tricky… There are just so many places in the world to go and see, and they’re all on our list! I don’t want to reveal all the details of where we’ll be just yet, but please note that I have high hopes of reenacting Braveheart in Scotland, so the UK is definitely on the list :)
-L