Project 1 - Botswana Conservation

The first leg of my trip will be to Botswana where I will be staying in the Motswiri Camp in the Kwa Tuli Reserve just over the border from South Africa. My time here will be somewhat like being on the dark side of the moon as I will be out in a wilderness camp and cut off from the Internet, phone, television, and so forth. Essentially it will be a technology black hole, at least which is what I am expecting when reading “prepare yourself for a stay away from amenities.” There are safaris in the area so it may not be completely cut off and there is a Wikipedia page on the area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuli_Block

At the camp I will be living in a bush-tent with other volunteers and be a 1-1/2 hour drive from the nearest town. There is a solar battery but no electricity otherwise and I think it will be an awesome way to start this by living outside under the stars out in the wild. Kinda Hemingway like. The camp is not fenced off and they make it clear you are not allowed to go anywhere on your own and need to have staff members with you. I read that to mean somebody needs to have a gun. The descriptions mentions there are elephants, hippos, hyenas, cheetah, impala, zebra and wildebeest are frequent in the area. Lions were not mentioned but I have to suspect they are around too.

As a volunteer I’ll be working 6-days a week with my time divided between research projects and “physical” projects. The research projects consist of things like collecting data and mapping GPS coordinates. Not sure exactly what that means but the physical projects my description goes into much more detail on. I take that to mean they are going to work me doing things like removing fence posts, repairing or clearing roads, etc. After having done a few hours of yard work at my condo this spring, I have a feeling this is going to kick my ass.

Week of Goodbye

This week and last have been a week of saying goodbye at work, which is something I don’t do well. It is just a bit uncomfortable for me as I don’t usually know what to say and find it easier to quietly do my thing and head out once I’m done. So I hope I don’t piss anybody off but I might have already.

It has been made harder for me as I could not have expected a better response from people at work on my decision. I knew friends would be supportive, and I thought my family would be too, but work I was not quite sure what to expect. If everybody was mad at me it would be pretty easy for me to make the jump and head out but it has been quite the opposite. I have been taken a bit back by how much support everybody has shown to me in the past few weeks. I’ve been treated to lunch multiple times now and there have been a few gifts that have taken me quite by surprise. I guess I don’t expect this or really think of what I am doing as deserving of it, so I am not always quite sure how to respond. There is a large envelope of personal notes handed to me at lunch last week that I’ve decided I am not going to read until I get on the plane.

The generosity of my friends and co-workers is making it harder for me to leave but I guess this is the first thing I am learning from this experience. You don’t always appreciate the people around you until you won’t have them anymore.

Things I'll Miss

A friend recently asked what it is that I’ll miss while traveling. At the time I did not really know and had not really given it much thought. There are the givens, I’ll miss family and friends but I can still talk to them via e-mail and Skype as long as I can figure out how to dial from abroad. But as far as other stuff, I had not really considered it.

Then as I wondered through the grocery store today it hit me that I’ll miss yogurt. I eat a lot, at least one a day, and it usually is one of the must grab things. Not having it on a regular basis is going to suck. As for other foods, there isn’t anything else I think I will miss that badly but that may change by the time I get back.

As for Chicago, on this nicest day of the year so far, I’ll miss summer in the city, mostly riding my bike on the lakefront and driving down Lake Shore Drive. I will not miss the DIVVY bikes however. And hopefully by the time I get back the construction along the lakefront will also be mostly complete, I will not miss that either.

Choosing An Organization

It took a while and I looked into a variety of organizations, including the Peace Corps and even the UN, but after kicking the idea around for a few months and looking at options I decided to put in an application with Project’s Abroad last December. I liked Project’s Abroad initially in part because they had the best marketing materials. As a former advertising major I know that is probably not the best reason to make a decision by Nothing wrong with marketing and advertising but it is usually a one sided story. Let’s face it, it would be really stupid to market yourself by talking about your organization's fails.

But I did some digging into them and they have been around since 1992. I found some bad comments about them on the internet but by far the comments were good. And the bad ones tended to be the parents of teenagers who, I’m reading between the lines, seemed to get themselves into trouble partying too much. I got the impression the parents thought PA would babysit their kids but I guess if your kids are prone to party to the point they get into a lot of trouble then you should probably not ship them off to a foreign country and get mad with somebody when things go sideways. Send them to Outward Bound instead where they are in the middle of nowhere and can't buy beer.

Anyway, besides nice marketing materials, they have some experience working with what they call “work breakers” or people in the middle of their careers. Nobody else talked about this but instead focused on 20 something or retired people. They were also very flexible where you could start and stop whenever was convenient and have a huge number of projects available all over the world. I participated in a couple of question forums and asked some questions and put in an application.

A few weeks later they accepted my application and the clock began ticking.

My Bag For 3 Months

Here is the bag I'm going to be living out of for three and a half months. It is bigger than it looks, which is good since I have to plan for both winter in South Africa and Peru and late summer in Europe, working in the wilderness, on the beach and in the classroom. I've got to haul it around everywhere I'm guessing a lot of cross functional clothing.

How I Got Here

I’ve been asked why I am leaving my job and going overseas for 3-1/2 months with no promise of employment when I get back. The short answer is I want some time off to take a look at what I am doing and decide if I want to do this for another 25+ years or if I should try something else.

I’ve had some good times at my current job but for many years I have also had a sense of dissatisfaction. But I was on cruise control and settled in to earning enough to make me comfortable when in 2012 I started working for a new manager whom I was not really comfortable with. Looking back he was OK but I did not like the change and then a year later and I found myself working for another new manager, this time with an extremely toxic personality and by the time the summer of 2014 came along I was burnt out. I’ll spare the details other than I don’t think he wanted me in his department and life got to the point at work where I did not care if he let me go.

In the fall of 2011 I had started coaching college novice rowing and I think it was that which gave me strength to get through what was a dark time at work. It was a totally different world and I don’t know that I made a difference there but it felt like it at times. Despite the fact that they paid barely enough to cover my expenses and I had to work even harder at my other job to keep it up, I did this 6 days a week for three seasons. Until the spring of ’14 when my toxic boss made me quit.

Being a coach at times seemed as much a psychological wellness position as a coaching position, and I started to think about what I would have told members of my team if they were going through the same thing. So I decided a change of momentum was needed and began to make plans to take time off. Everything was in motion, I committed to Projects Abroad and made a down payment, refinanced my condo, and had started putting everything in motion when suddenly in January I have a new boss, one that happen to respect and like working for.

It took about two weeks but with my old boss gone I started to realize how bad things had gotten for me and now they were getting better. In turn, this was probably the first crisis for me on leaving as now I was faced with a very different environment at work. It was not too late to call the whole thing off and would have been easy, nobody really knew about my plans at that point. But the more I thought about it the more I began to realize my old boss probably did me a favor. I had been dissatisfied with work for a while and by pushing me right up to the edge I finally took it into my hands to do something about it. I won’t miss you but thank you.

To those of you whom I coached, you don't know it but you too had a hand in my making this decision so a heart felt thank you to you as well.

But there is more to my decision than working for a boss I did not like and some of my original dissatisfaction I believe stems back to 9/11, which probably sounds dumb, but that day most certainly changed my perception of things. For one I became proud of what this country can stand for. I also disliked some of the things it has come to be associated with and as such I wanted to do something that made the world a better place. Cue sappy music.

Most people don’t know this about me but one year after 9/11 I started working at becoming a cop because I saw that as something I could do that would make a difference in peoples lives. During the course of over two years I took the police exams in Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, and a half dozen suburbs. I've actually been hooked up to a lie detector twice. Between that and the competitive rowing team I was a part of organizing, I felt as if I was working towards something. In 2005 all the stars were aligning, my team was very competitive going into the biggest race of the year and I had been given an intent to hire by a local department with a date to report to the police academy.

That date conflicted with the Head of the Charles and after working so hard that season I did not want to miss the race nor did I want to force my boat to replace me with only a few weeks to go. So I deferred my date to report to the academy. We did not win a medal, 0.0168 seconds too slow for that, but that year is still the high point of my rowing career, however it may have been my undoing in being a cop. An injury that I am pretty sure was aggravated by training with the team got worse after the season and when the time came to report to the academy I was not able to do the run. Unable to defer the date again I had to decline the position and that put an end to it all. At 35 I was too old to apply elsewhere and walking away was very hard for me to deal with but looking back I don’t think I would have changed anything. Despite how things turned out in January of '06, 2005 with its potentials for the future was perhaps the happiest time I have had. Ever since I suppose I have been trying to figure out how to get back to that. Until now.

This decision to take time off has me excited about the potential of the future again and in many ways I feel stronger now than I have at any time in the last 10 years. I suppose it could totally blow up in my face but for the first time in a long time it feels like the possibilities are wide open. I have no idea what will happen but if feels like good things are on the horizon.