My advice

Future Participant,
 Today I’m sitting in America in a room with a big diagonal skylight that gives me a great view of the sky and trees nearby. The sky is grey, and in some unexpected way, this is a profound reminder that I’m in a different place now, a different world. Here, clouds mean rain, and if you don’t put on a jacket when you look up and see they grey, you’ll regret it. But in Zambia, winters have plenty of clouds but no rain, like when you upset a baby and it grimaces and stares and you cringe, bracing for the tears but they never come. And in the same way you let out a sigh of relief when the baby keeps quiet, you’ll probably find yourself sighing every afternoon in Zambia; no rain, no life shattering failures, no reason to call it quits.
 If nothing else, Zambia taught me to relax – to understand that things might not go as planned, and to know that when they don’t, I’ll be fine. It taught me to see clouds and not freak out about rain. When you get there, when you’re in the heat of your research, you’ll have interviews when you fish for answers and don’t get them, moments when you work hard for something and it doesn’t happen, moments when you think you look like a fool. But if you let the mellow Zambian lifestyle help you keep it all in perspective, you’ll be glad you did.
 That’s not the only advice I have, though. The more time you spend anywhere, the longer your list of shoulda-coulda-woulda’s becomes. So, I’ve decided to write some of mine here, in case you actually read this in search of some practical suggestions.
 1)  Download A LOT of music. Sure, you’ll sometimes have the wifi to save some playlists in country, but this wifi can less reliable than you might expect, and when you’re on an eight-hour bus ride to the middle of nowhere, you’ll want to hear anything but the same twenty songs you’d been playing all trip.
2)  Bring iodine tablets. Buying water is a real pain, and without iodine there will certainly be afternoons where you want to just lay in bed and binge-watch Game of Thrones but you’re parched and you need to walk to the store for some Aquasavana instead. If you live at Abundant Life, you’ll be almost next door to a good grocery store where you can buy water, but trust me, you’ll have a couple days where you’re so lazy you’ll be glad you can just drink purified sink water.
3)  Plan your post-program excursion early. If you want to stay in Africa for a bit before you head home after the trip, figure it out and do your research early. There is a lot to do in Southern Africa, but the quicker you decide what you’d want to do, the more freedom you’ll have. Also, if you’re feeling adventurous, I ardently recommend hitting some national parks in Botswana. Some of the folks on my trip and I went on a 10-day self-drive safari in Botswana and it was easily one of the coolest experiences of my life to date.
4)  Live and die by google drive. My research partner and I made one big google drive folder with little folders full of articles to cite, interview transcripts, contact lists, and section outlines. We also did all of our writing and editing for our paper in google docs and made our final presentation on google slides. When everything is in one place, your work feels a bit less overwhelming.

Hope this helped!

Paul