When?

We leave for Nigeria on April 15th, 2009 and are scheduled to return just under four months later. Yes, all three of us are going, me, Stephanie, Timothy. Yes, my mom is going to miss us terribly!

I have spent many a moment of late pondering the little things we take for granted in this country and wondering which of those things I am going to miss the most.

Ice Cream! I love ice cream. I was in the supermarket recently and was flabbergasted by the number of available choices. Five different brands all offering three, or more often four different shades of vanilla: Vanilla bean, natural vanilla, french vanilla, new york vanilla, lowfat vanilla, old-fashioned vanilla. That’s just looking at the vanilla. Will ice cream be available in Enugu? Most likely not. Even if it were to be found in a local grocery, it may not be safe to consume with the frequency of power outages throughout the country.

Highways. Many Tuesdays I travel well over a hundred miles. Forty-plus miles round trip to church, maybe ninety to Hudson and back. These trips across town don’t take much longer than a mile per minute given our luxurious road system. It’ll be different there.

Hot showers. Oh. I can see already this is going to be a problem. It is quite unknown what we will encounter for our plumbing situation. Suffice it to say I will miss my hot showers immeasurably.

There are, quite literally, dozens of these kinds of thoughts I have had in recent months. I share a smattering of them just to get it out there and in the open. I will certainly not catalogue the entire laundry list of differences and adjustments, but it’s a pretty good bet that a majority of the adjustments will be significant.