Ten years ago today, I woke up in Africa
Exactly ten years ago today, I awoke to discover that I was not in Kansas America any more. Late on the evening of September 19th, 1997, I had arrived by plane at Lilongwe International Airport in Malawi after two days of travel from Washington, D.C. With me on the journey were about 25 people I had just met a couple days earlier. Everyone I had ever known and everything familiar to me were all suddenly half a world away.
Quite naturally I began to wonder what in the world I was doing. Why hadn’t I just gotten a job… a real job like a normal college graduate? Sure everybody talks about joining the Peace Corps. We all saw the same TV commercials growing up and thought that looked like a really “cool thing to do”. But who actually goes and does it? As I stepped outside the morning of the 20th, I knew that the answer was… me. I actually went and did it.
At that moment I really had no idea what was in store for me during the next two years. In retrospect it was a wonderful experience that I would never trade for anything. Of course the highs were high, the lows were very low, and there were many times along the way that I thought I had made a big mistake. But I was always able to pull myself together, laugh about my troubles, and continue the journey.
My ability to make it through those two years was due in no small part to the support of those around me: my fellow Peace Corps volunteers, the Peace Corps staff, the teachers and students at my school, and all the Malawians I met along the way. To this day I feel a special connection to Malawi and a strong bond with everyone from my original group. Most of them I’ve kept in touch with, many I’ve seen recently, and the rest I think about regularly. I’m sure this ten-year anniversary of the beginning of our adventure brings back memories for all of us.
So to Alaina, Alex, Angie, Becky, Betty, Christine, Craig, Eleanor, Elise, Fred, George, Ivy, Jen, Jodie, Joe, Judy, Julianne, Julie B, Julie S, Katrina, Kim, Melanie, and Tonya, I thank you for sharing the Peace Corps experience with me and wish you the very best in all you choose to do. Zikomo kwambiri and yewo, yewo, yewo chomene.
Maybe in another ten years, I’ll go all Sergeant Pepper on you: “It was twenty years ago today…” In the meantime, take care and muyende bwino anzanga.
Sphere: Related ContentIf you blog it, they will come?
Not likely. I think anybody who has tried their hand at blogging would agree unless they were already famous for something else. Personally I’ve been stuck around 25 RSS subscribers for several months and can’t seem to get over that hump.
Lately I’ve been evaluating everything that I’m doing outside of my day job with an eye toward separating the wheat from the chaff. There are only so many hours in the day and I like to spend quite a few of those with my family, so time for outside interests and/or pursuits is at a premium. In my previous post I mentioned my reading habits and I’m happy to report that I’ve unsubscribed from several feeds and now click the “Mark all as read” button with increasing impunity.
Bolstered by this “radical” exertion of control over my time, I’m ready to simplify my life a little more. In addition to freeing up some more family time, I would like to devote more time to blogging on a regular basis. Since blogging in a near vacuum is not terribly rewarding, I need to take some steps to build traffic and attract more regular readers. I plan to use the time-honored problem solving technique known as trial and error in a couple of different ways.
- What do people want to read? I plan to narrow the focus of this blog to just two or three related areas. In making this decision, I will be writing about a lot of different topics in the next several weeks to determine which topics are viable. That’s not to say that I’m going to become like a politician and just write what people want to read, but I do want to know where the audience is within the topics that I already write about.
- How do I find new readers? There are quite a few services and techniques that I can try out in my efforts to grow my readership. One of them already has a widget on this page. Do you see it over there in the right column? Yes, BlogRush is a new service that promises to bring targeted traffic to blogs in proportion to the number of page views their widget gets on each blog. There’s some referral mumbo-jumbo thrown in for good measure, but it sounds like it’s worth a shot. And if it doesn’t work out, then bye-bye widget. Another site I’ve heard great things about lately is StumbleUpon. Many bloggers are reporting large increases in traffic to their blogs after becoming active users of the site, so I’ve decided to give it a shot. Again, if it doesn’t pan out, I’ll stop.
So this should be an interesting few weeks as I give these ideas a spin. Stay tuned for a wider variety of posts as I try different topics and if you’ve landed here from BlogRush or StumbleUpon, welcome! I hope you’ll consider sticking around.
Sphere: Related ContentConfessions of an info junkie
All right, I admit it. I am without a doubt an information junkie. I’ve come to terms with this fact after a couple recent revelations about my feed consumption.
I subscribe to nearly 300 feeds in Google Reader and this is after pruning quite a few from my list. I actually feel guilty when I click “Mark all as read” on a feed that I can’t keep up with. Last week was kind of crazy at my newspaper (and that’s a completely different story), but one result of all the chaos and deadlines was that I fell way behind on monitoring all of our RSS feeds. This is a non-critical task, but one that I usually stay on top of and that does uncover small areas for improvement from time to time. And going through all our stories on a daily basis helps me to feel more connected to our reporters and what they are writing about. Usually I take a few minutes between tasks several times a day to read a few stories. Last week got away from me, however, so by the time I got around to this I had more than 400 unread stories. With a twinge of guilt, I clicked the heretofore forbidden link: “Mark all as read”. I immediately starting wondering what I was missing out on by doing that. Sheesh.
Then tonight I noticed that Google Reader has released a small update that enables it to count all the way to 1000 instead of just 100 (among other things). Feeds with lots of unread items used to just be labeled as “100+”, but now more than likely (unless one is really far behind) the actual number of unread items will be shown. I long ago organized all my feeds into about 25 very specific folders one of which is “blogging”. I had deluded myself into thinking that I could catch up and at least skim all the unread items in this most neglected of folders. After all, it just said 100+. How bad could it be? Well now I know that there are exactly 524 unread items in that folder!
Plowing through all that information would be borderline quixotic, but I still feel an odd compulsion to try. I’m not sure if this is due to my competitive nature (me vs. Google Reader) or a desire not to miss out on any important stuff. I’m leaning toward the latter. I don’t have a definite plan for resolving this situation, but I’m going to start by going through all the feeds one-by-one and deciding which ones are really worthwhile. I’ll let you know how that goes.
In doing that, I can’t help but wonder if I would unsubscribe from this blog if I wasn’t me. In other words, is my own blog worthy of subscribers? At this point, I’m not sure but 27 people seem to think that it is worthy (according to FeedBurner). For their sake and mine, I am resolved to bring this ramshackle blog back up to snuff… just as soon as I finish reading these 524 posts…
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