The Adventures DO continue

It is incredible how you can pray for something so long, and all along you know its going to happen, but it still blows your mind when it finally dose.

As of tomorrow, October 24^th I am off for my next big adventure- Africa. Finally. I have been trying to get myself to Africa for as long as I can remember. Every short little visit I have had there has only broken my heart when I had to leave. But this time- I am going to stay.

My first location will actually be Durban, South Africa where I will be presenting at the World Fecal Sludge Management Conference on solar inactivation of helminth eggs in fecal sludge (what I did down in Chile). As pumped as I am to go to South Africa, I will only be there 1 week and will be in the conference the whole time- so there will not be much time for exploring, yet.

November 1^st I begin work with Water and Sanitation for Urban Poor (WaSUP) where I am hired as a consultant sanitation engineer and will be running a latrine design and implementation project in Naivasha, Kenya. I am pumped about this opportunity because Andy Narracott, my boss, knows EVERYONE and EVERYTHING in the sanitation world. I am going to learn so much from him, and be able to meet people doing the same things I am from around the world. I will be working in a lot of various slums in the south part of Kenya, but will be based in Naivasha, a small town a few hours outside of the capital Nairobi.

Then on top of consultant work for WaSUP, my company received funding from a German sanitation company called GIZ to do pre-pilot work there in Kenya. The idea is that we will have funding to be able to implement a large solar sanitation system this coming year, so currently we have funding to try and get everything possible ready for when that funding is approved. So I will be designing, testing, calculating and talking to a lot of locals in hopes of Sanivation receiving funding in 2013 for a large pilot system.

So to sum all of this up: basically I am going to live my dreams. I am going to be living in Africa, in slums, using my engineering to truly make a difference in people’s lives. I will be just a handful of miles from the most incredible landscapes, animals and adventures. I am about to embark on the next journey of my life to see things I have never dreamed of before, to meet people I have never met before, to try things I have only ever read about.

I leave in about 12 hours and keeping with my true identity, I have not started to pack yet, I don’t have visas yet, I don’t know exactly where I am going when I get there, don’t really know what exactly I will be doing, but I am positive it will all work out – because it always dose. So shoot a prayer out for me, and send me your final farewell texts because as Shakira so wisely wrote “it’s time for Africa!”