Gut Feelings
This trip was difficult long before I ever left. I was having second thoughts a couple of weeks before I left, but a non-refundable plane ticket had me hooked.
At first it seemed so perfect. The Africa of my first travel dreams was calling. I found an ad on Dave's ESL looking for volunteers; the timing was perfect and the bait was a three day safari, all expenses paid. Noises were made that contributions towards flights might be possible; Alison, the woman organizing the trip implying she had done these many times before, had lots of funding experience and a host of people queuing up to give her money. Later these assertions would turn out to fall somewhere between very generous stretches of the imagination and outright lies.
Then came the flight drama. I couldn't get one. And the more I put off making a decision, the rarer and more expensive they became; at last my only option for getting from Japan to Africa was business class. Of course I wanted to go in August. Super prime travel time for Japanese, who in their organized way, manage to plan months, if not years ahead for overseas trips.
I pretty much gave up, and a smarter person would have realized this was the universe in protection mode. I started looking at other options: I had five weeks off and money to go anywhere. Most of Asia would be engulfed in monsoon rains: there went Sumatra, Burma, and Nepal, my next choices. South America was equally expensive as Africa and Europe really didn't appeal. I started thinking about catching the new train from Beijing to Lhasa, wondering about the politics of using a means guaranteed to finally destroy what is left of Tibetan culture.
But many years of dreams of Africa haunted my subconscious. Then a bright idea. Catch a flight from Seoul to Kenya. A Korean workmate recently mentioned he got a flight to Seoul for the bargain basement price of about $50. I managed to organize a ticket for around my budget and was going. Ticket paid for, couriered over and I was locked in.
After my failed fundraising attempt, I was assured that if I sent all the boxes of stationary over that I had collected, I would be reimbursed the postage cost. Yeah right. The tundra will melt first.
Alison was awaiting charity status so she could procure funds. She told us that AVIF was a new charity set up specifically for the Kenya project. As soon as the registration went through, she could access the funds promised through grants. None of us ever questioned this. At the time I was trying to get my head around fundraising myself, Bo and I needing to raise vast amounts of money to get the roof rethatched at Chiiori. I was really looking forward to learning about the art of asking people for large amounts of cash.
A week before we were due to leave Alison told us all that she wouldn't be coming as she herself couldn't afford a plane ticket. Alarm bells started hammering. The words UNPROFESSIONAL screamed in my head, but I banished them, preferring not to worry about how a single parent could set up an NGO as her main activity and not have figured out how to pay herself; Alison now pleading dire poverty and claiming she could barely afford to feed her kid.
I focused instead on the positives. What could really go wrong. I had a plane ticket, a safe amount of cash and a huge chunk of time.
I was going.
At first it seemed so perfect. The Africa of my first travel dreams was calling. I found an ad on Dave's ESL looking for volunteers; the timing was perfect and the bait was a three day safari, all expenses paid. Noises were made that contributions towards flights might be possible; Alison, the woman organizing the trip implying she had done these many times before, had lots of funding experience and a host of people queuing up to give her money. Later these assertions would turn out to fall somewhere between very generous stretches of the imagination and outright lies.
Then came the flight drama. I couldn't get one. And the more I put off making a decision, the rarer and more expensive they became; at last my only option for getting from Japan to Africa was business class. Of course I wanted to go in August. Super prime travel time for Japanese, who in their organized way, manage to plan months, if not years ahead for overseas trips.
I pretty much gave up, and a smarter person would have realized this was the universe in protection mode. I started looking at other options: I had five weeks off and money to go anywhere. Most of Asia would be engulfed in monsoon rains: there went Sumatra, Burma, and Nepal, my next choices. South America was equally expensive as Africa and Europe really didn't appeal. I started thinking about catching the new train from Beijing to Lhasa, wondering about the politics of using a means guaranteed to finally destroy what is left of Tibetan culture.
But many years of dreams of Africa haunted my subconscious. Then a bright idea. Catch a flight from Seoul to Kenya. A Korean workmate recently mentioned he got a flight to Seoul for the bargain basement price of about $50. I managed to organize a ticket for around my budget and was going. Ticket paid for, couriered over and I was locked in.
After my failed fundraising attempt, I was assured that if I sent all the boxes of stationary over that I had collected, I would be reimbursed the postage cost. Yeah right. The tundra will melt first.
Alison was awaiting charity status so she could procure funds. She told us that AVIF was a new charity set up specifically for the Kenya project. As soon as the registration went through, she could access the funds promised through grants. None of us ever questioned this. At the time I was trying to get my head around fundraising myself, Bo and I needing to raise vast amounts of money to get the roof rethatched at Chiiori. I was really looking forward to learning about the art of asking people for large amounts of cash.
A week before we were due to leave Alison told us all that she wouldn't be coming as she herself couldn't afford a plane ticket. Alarm bells started hammering. The words UNPROFESSIONAL screamed in my head, but I banished them, preferring not to worry about how a single parent could set up an NGO as her main activity and not have figured out how to pay herself; Alison now pleading dire poverty and claiming she could barely afford to feed her kid.
I focused instead on the positives. What could really go wrong. I had a plane ticket, a safe amount of cash and a huge chunk of time.
I was going.
posted by Kirstie at 10:24 am
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