I have no idea what I am doing.

This thought hits me as I sit at the gate waiting for my plane to arrive to bring me to South Africa and then to Malawi. Having already travelled overnight and still with another day to go I feel a pit in my stomach as I write this post. Maybe it was the airline food I had ate hours ago (some sort of BBQ chicken concoction made by the chefs at United Airlines), but more likely it was finally realizing that my internship, spending seven weeks in Blantyre working at the Malawi Polytechnic University with fellow Rice Interns, has finally begun.

Before I continue any further I want to focus a little more on what I will be doing over this summer and what to expect from this blog post. Over the course of this trip I will be working on improving projects that were brought from Rice University, partnering with local students at the polytechnic to discover solutions to major problems here, and conducting needs finding to discover more issues that can be worked on in the Rice 360 class in the coming years. Personally I have brought anti-fog silica gel eyewear attachments that my team and I have worked on over the past semester but we have also brought a breast cancer training model and an ostomy bag train model among others. This blog should chronicle my experiences with these projects along with anything else we do over the course of trip, ranging from places we have visited to hardships and frustrations we will encounter.

I have travelled in the past before, but this was the first time I have travelled alone overnight. In addition I will have visited Europe and Africa for the first time by this time tomorrow. This experience almost has a surreal quality to it, especially since I am traveling alone until I reach Johannesburg where I will meet up with the rest of the interns. If anything I think traveling like this is fitting; although I may not know exactly what I have in store for me (though if you are reading this in the future you will), I will say that I am definitely being pushed out of my comfort zone. I never expected to do something like this. In fact, I never really considered traveling abroad in any capacity in college. But now sitting in the airport having returned from visiting the city of Frankfurt holding a Rindswurst in one hand (I have no idea what that is; a local recommended that I get one while in the city) and typing this with the other, it strikes me that I will be learning so much more than just what I had signed up for. I came because I wanted to see how other countries dealt with regional health issues and to explore the different solutions that ingenious people around the world come up with, but even though I haven’t arrived yet I have already learned a lot about myself. I am not a huge fan of figs, I can’t sleep on planes for the life of me, and mustard in Germany is the most amazing thing I have had in a long while. These may seem super trivial but I think they underscore a larger point; living abroad hopefully I will be able to learn as much about myself while magnifying my passions for bioengineering, specifically in a global health setting.