Its been ten days since I arrived in Blantyre. Everything has happened so fast, the only thing I can say I clearly remember from those ten days is stuffing myself with passion fruit, which is delicious by the way.Now that I have finally settled and unpacked all my stuff I can finally sit down and think of what has actually happened this past ten days. Let’s go back 12 days ago, May, 26th when I flew out of El Paso, my parents drove me to the airport, where my closest friends were waiting for me to say goodbye. My mom and dad got emotional since this is the longest amount of time I will be away from home, I’m not going to lie, I did too. I flew to Houston where I met up with the Rice 360 interns, from there we flew to Heathrow, London where we had a six-hour layover, although it did not feel that long. After the six-hour layover, we had to sit in the plane and wait for another two hours because the pilot needed a letter signed in order to take off, I, of course, was not bothered by this and went to sleep.

I was born in Mexico, therefore I travel under a Mexican passport, which was something completely weird to the officer in immigration at Johannesburg. When I handed him my passport he stared at it with such a clueless face. He did not even open the passport book, he just sent me directly to customs upstairs. I was frightened by this, since all of my colleagues, who were traveling under an American passport, got past immigration with no problem. I went upstairs and got lost, when I finally found where i needed to be, I got told I could not go pick up my luggage, so the other interns had to do me the favor. At the airport in Blantyre, we got picked up by a nice man with a sign that said “Rice interns” (I don’t go to Rice though??). I still cannot believe I am here, in Malawi, for a summer internship, after my first year of college.

*There’s a part two to this that talks about what I am doing here, please cope with me, I have a lot of things to say. *