ok, so i hope i'm not an instant addict (he's got a taste for the stuff) and not that i would consider myself to be on a roll, but i feel i should include a quick bit of explanation about a few things...
A. I am not a cannibal, nor condone the eating of your fellow man (though if that is your things and you want to do it in the privacy of your own home that's your business...) I am traveling with two lovely (well one lovely, one passable ;) individuals, Brittney Exline and Samuel Ribnick. They are both good friends of mine and if this venture ends up in scenario 2, hopefully partners in crime.
B. We are not JUST headed to Cameroon to get better tans and feast of the delicious plantain, we recieved $10,000 and 100 XO laptops from the non-profit One Laptop Per Child to impement a radical new education program somewhere in Africa. We are partnering with an NGO in the Southwestern province of Cameroon called the United Action for Children, where we will be giving the XOs and extending wireless internet to students 6-12 years of age at the Jamadianle School near Buea.
C. We are not planning on being cam"marooned" and each of us is off to more adventures after the summers end. Sam and I will be headed to Jordan, where will be studying abroab next semester at the Qasid Institute for Classic and Modern Standard Arabic in the heart of the capital Amman. Sam will be learing to pronounce the word "Qasid" (deep in the throat with a low glottal stop) while I improve work on acquiring Jordanian Dialect and touring the rest of the Middle East by foot or by crook (preferrably foot, its the most sole-ful way to travel ;) on the weekends. Brittney will be headed back to Philly to continue programming (her love affair with computer science being long and torrid) and explain to the rest of the Penn where the dynamic duo went of course.
The last thing I would like to clarify is the title of this blog. Its from a poem by the japanese poet Issa. it goes: The man pulling radishes/pointed my way/with a radish. short and sweet you might think? perhaps but these 3 lines suffer from a serious Napolean syndrome at least in my view, and I could spend some time explicating how this poem is really a very profound commmentary on the role each of has to play in the world, the issue of perspective, and most importantly dealing with everything traveling the world can entail, but i'll leave the details for another time and let you draw your own interpretations for now. Cheerio! (and milk ;)
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