Today I am packing and repacking, thinking and rethinking the decisions about what I should take to Ethiopia.
I am grateful for the short list of non-negotiables: passport, proof of immunization card, malaria prescription, insect repellant, cameras and other technical equipment, notebooks and pens.
It’s decisions about the other items — clothes, shoes and personal care products — that cause so much doubt. Do I really need this? Can I manage without that?
I always start out packing for a trip by piling everything I can possibly imagine wanting with me on my bed. And then, as I walk through various scenarios in my head for the days I will be away, I start pulling things out of the pile and moving them back to my closet.
For this trip, especially, I want to travel light. I will have enough to juggle with all the technical equipment I am taking. I don’t want to also be hauling around a lot of clothes.
So I’ve made some decisions about what’s important and what’s not. Under the “what’s not” category, for example, are items that speak to personal vanity. I’m not taking a hair dryer. (Who knows if it would even work with the electrical converter? Who knows if we’ll even have electricity every day?)
I need one semi-dressy outfit for the day we will spend at the American Embassy, awaiting visas for Tesfanesh and Mintesnot Solomon deGuzman. There is another possible event happening in the capitol city of Addis Ababa for which I would need to be dressed up. One outfit will serve just fine for both events.
I’ve chosen clothing that works with black shoes so that I need only one pair of casual shoes and one pair of dress shoes. As it is the height of the rainy season in Ethiopia, I suspect most days I’ll be wearing my $25 black rubber rain boots anyway. The guidebook says July typically sees up to 11 inches of rain.
As careful as I’m being to avoid overpacking, there are three things I will make room for. To me, they are non-negotiable — my talismans of travel.
The first is a beautiful Ethiopian scarf, a gift from Christian World Foundation, to thank me for the first article we ran about Brian and Keri deGuzman on our website last year. The foundation works to “feed, clothe, medicate, educate and care for the children of the world” and is affiliated with Christian World Adoption, the non-profit agency through which the deGuzmans have adopted all four of their Ethiopian-born children.
The second is a bracelet given to me by the “daughter” who lived with me this past spring. Andrea is really the daughter of my second cousin Sheryl, who lives in western Pennsylvania, but she lived with my husband and me as she completed her sophomore year at ASU. Before she went home for the summer, she left me a gift: a snowflake obsidian bracelet imbued with the spirit of “safe travel.” Snowflake obsidian is the stone of movement and promises to provide “balance in times of change.”
The third is a smoothly polished stone bear, an authentic Navajo fetish that a trusted counselor and cherished mentor urged me to carry on my journey. She has an entire collection of fetishes on the bookshelves in her office, each of which means something different and each of which became significant to her during steps along her way toward completing her Ph.D. thesis, which was done within the cultural context of the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona.
This particular fetish symbolizes healing and strength. As she has done so much in the past few months to help me with both, I will certainly keep this powerful talisman close to me at all times during the unimaginable events to come.
