23,875 Miles Traveled

Feb 23, 2010
Arusha, Tanzania
Overcast, cool. Rain yesterday.

Today we leave for safari, and everything I’m taking with me is packed into a backpack. Unfortunately, my netbook was not among those things deemed necessary. So, for the next three days, no journal entries. Not that I’ve been doing a great job at keeping up recently.
I keep having these horrible nightmares. I don’t know if they are linked to taking malarone, but they definitely got worse when I started taking it again. I’m trying to get good sleep, but it’s difficult when I keep waking up thinking that the world is definitely not okay. Right now, I have no internet, no cell phone reception, and I keep thinking about my family. I wish I could talk to my parents and tell them I’m doing alright and see how they are. I know that Denny intends us to be completely isolated from the world and focus on ourselves and our own growth. I guess this is what he wanted all along.
Last night at dinner, four men dressed in leopard and zebra print costumes came out and did acrobatic tricks for us. Their audience was almost entirely white Europeans, with one table of Africans. While they were very talented and did many cool tricks, something about it seemed very wrong. I looked around and everyone sort of looked a little taken aback. I think that it seemed like too much of a parody of real African culture to be enjoyable.
Africa seems to be one of the most interesting places we have been. Before I even got off the plane, I looked down at the savannahs and jungles and immediately began to fall in love.