Back Home! Africa is my favorite place/ San Diego is my favorite place

Here I am, back in Cali. It is funny how fast you can go from hanging out with Nigeria militants and working with people suffering from extreme disadvantages to going to a yoga class and walking on the beach with your aunt. Everything has their thing, and hopefully they get good at that thing, I guess that my "thing" is traveling around the world and thats just how it goes. I love and am so grateful for the opportunities that I have had thus far and I am excited for what the future holds. I don't usually write posts when I am state-side, but I thought that I would make an exception.

The last post that I wrote was right after my birthday while I was still in Nigeria. A bit has happened since. After that whole post about me humbling myself and accepting that subordiant role, things got to a point where I could no longer accept my partner's leadership and had to separate our project and hold the reings of my own content. It was a very difficult decision and process, and was a very complicate and a little messy, but when all was said and done, words do not describe the feeling of freedom that one feels when they demand their own volition and can chart their own course.

On Jan 30th, Michael, Jess and I temporarily sasid goodbye to our new home in Bayelsa and began our journey home. It was strange to leave as it really was beginning to feel like a home. Our trip home was going fine, until I sleepily walked off our flight in the Frankfurt Airport @ 5:30am without my laptop, which not only was a new mac, but had thousands of pictures and ALL of our video footage. Kinda a let down, but sometimes, once you pull a stupid move and there is nothing that you can do about it, you just have to move on.

So here I am, working my butt off to make sure that things are going well with SCHAP while I am preparing for my next trip back to Nigeria. Meeting and emails, more meeting and more emails. Its good though, its what I signed up for.

What are the plans now? Well, now it is time to get back to Nigeria, iron out the details of our project, do some additional recon, prep and community organizing and hopefully get started asap.

Don't want to bore you with any more of the details of my domestic life, I find them uninteresting to write about, but send me your thoughts and prayers that we will be able to make great progress with our project in Nigeria. I am going back and throwing in all the chips that things will work out according to my expectations. That's the only way to do it sometimes.