Traveling to Africa - Winter 2009

Women at a healthcare rally

I recently got back from 5 weeks in Africa where I was traveling for work. In case you don't remember, I now run Princeton in Africa, a program that annually sends 25 recent college grads on year-long fellowships in service organizations throughout the continent of Africa. The best bonus of the job is an annual extensive trip to Africa to do site visits to potential partner organizations to make sure they would be good places for Princeton in Africa Fellows. My recent trip took me to Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Kenya.

In many ways, traveling for work definitely felt very different. I was online and connected all the time, checking my work emails and attending to work responsibilities. This was possible because I had much more WIFI than I ever would have expected in Africa. All of this meant I had a slightly different lens to view things from. On the really good side, it was great to be able to visit an assortment of organizations doing valuable work on the ground. I visited health clinics, schools, agriculture micro-lending sites and more. As always the best part was being connected to hard working passionate people working to improve the world around them. This kind of travel connected me to local people beyond the tourist sector which made the places I visited even more real.

On the bad side, my intense work schedule made it hard to find as much time to write about my trip. You will see a few pieces below, but I spent more of my free time taking photographs. As always you can read the titles to hear a little more about the trip. Since Flickr makes it a little harder to see the titles during the slide show function, please be sure to follow the directions that are posted below the links.