16 Jan 2008 -- after four years of aspiration (to go back to Africa, give something back, make a difference, fight AIDS) and two years of detailed planning (except if it was so detailed, why is everything now feeling so uncertain?) -- we booked flights just before Christmas and will fly to Johannesburg on 4 Feb, en route to the National University of Lesotho.
Why? It started with a Canon Collins Memorial Lecture in 2003, at the London Institute of Education. The talk was quite technical -- lots of epidemiology and demographics, and no apology for being technical. There were multidimensional graphs -- stark statistics -- about the effects of ripping the young adults (age 20 to 40) out of a population. We left feeling we had our wits and our health left, and we should 'go there and do something' as soon as we retired, while we still had wits and health.
Now we are 61 and 60, and not retired -- so we've wangled 12 weeks' time out from work ('scholarly activities' for one of us; accumulated leave for the other) and off we go.
We have made plans: visited Lesotho several times, made contacts at the University, decided our best bet was to work in health education (and the library infrastructure that supports health education).
Yesterday I emailed arrival dates to the University. But email isn't always picked up -- I'll try to phone tomorrow. Somewhere else on this blog I'll have to say who we are, I suppose, and what we specifically hope to do.
