Here’s some news.
This summer we are headed back to Africa, but this time for longer than five weeks.
Julie was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Botswana for 2017-2018. We leave for Botswana the first part of July, and will stay until next spring.
In the interim, our not-so-secret plan is to spend as much time as we can exploring southern Africa by 4x4, and, if the geo-political situation will allow for it, making a Cape-to-Cairo run at the conclusion of our time in Botswana.
But for now, we’re just silently and not-so-silently panicking because we just found out about the award, and we leave in basically three months. Not a huge amount of time in the scale of things to figure a lot of things out.
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One question we are debating - the grant offers a sum of money to cover miscellaneous moving expenses, and it would theoretically cover the cost of shipping a vehicle to Botswana. Do we use that money to send our Jeep over to Africa, or do we plow it into buying a truck over there?
I see some pros and cons for both considerations, most of which have completely cratered the post I was getting ready to publish about my agonizing about replacing the Jeep. I’ll publish that post as soon as I can, because I am genuinely interested in all your opinions on that decision, and the clock is a-tickin’.
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In any case, we feel incredibly lucky, because (risking a brush with cliche) our trip to Africa in 2015 was so life-changing for us. This will be both a challenging and exciting experience, but I’m looking forward to it, and looking forward to sharing it with all of you.
