Last Chance to Be…

I haven’t slept in a month, not properly anyway. I tried to get drunk the other night and slept 7 hours straight but that was the exception. Most nights I have had between one and four hours. My mind is buzzing with thoughts and ideas, checklists, shopping lists and ‘To Do’ lists. I can’t stop thinking about them. Slowly, I have started to cross things off and I feel like tonight is the night. My ‘mini umbrella’ and last minute ‘Deet‘ purchase arrived. I went through my Outlook tasks list and what was once a huge list of 74 things I had to do before I leave, now shows only five tasks. I have everything that I am taking. I even packed and weighed my bag and it came in underweight.

Apart from the thoughts about the placement itself, there should be no reason why I should wake up in the middle of the night tonight.

I have started taking my Larium and have not suffered side-effects, which is nice, quite the opposite in fact. In the short hours I have slept, I keep having really funny dreams since I took my first dose. Last night I was ‘pussycat racing’ which I might explain one day, when I am having a really long equatorial night.

I am not a keen artist and Microsoft Paint with a laptop trackpad thing is not easy. I did manage however, to produce the following works of art during my recent long nights.

This is my preconceived idea about how my placement might look. That’s me on the left standing near some chickens. My house is on the left with school buildings on the right and a water tower in the background. I think this shows you how much information I have about where I am going. It will be interesting to see how this compares to the real thing.

The second masterpiece is called a stakeholder analysis and is loosely based on a Venn Diagram. After a while on my placement I will draw it again. It may help me to understand my placement in a way which may make me a more effective volunteer. I think it is self-explanatory. I wonder who I have missed out.