So I guess... [05.29.2010]

... I'm a little bit nervous.

It's less than a few hours before I leave for my internship site and my mom is knocking on my bedroom door. Glance over to the clock, it's 5AM. My flight leaves at 3PM. Yeah, for my mom that seems about right.

"Sarah chan, don't you want to reschedule your flight? You're going to be arriving so late - aren't you going to be terrified? Aren't you even the slightest bit nervous? You should be more nervous! Be more nervous!"

Today, I left the tiny town of Falls Church, VA to start my internship in Ciudad Juárez. I will be volunteering for an organization that offers free healthcare to the public; an office based in El Paso, TX but the real work is done across the border in Mexico. I don't know much about the area that I will be travelling to except for what I have read in the news. And there has been a lot of news about Juárez. Recently named as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, the violence on Mexico's most well-known border city has certainly picked up over the last few years. Attributed largely to drug related "turf war," there have been a significant number of murders of both the involved and the innocent.

The taxi ride from the El Paso International Airport to the University of Texas, El Paso gave me a little tour of the area. Signs that read 10 miles to Juárez... 5 miles to Juárez... 1 mile - most everything written in a mix of Spanish and English, sometimes just Spanish. Strange scenes like a massive Target with an expansive parking lot right across the highway from a tiny neighborhood of houses piled on top of one another. At one point, I could even see the football stadium like lights that were lined up on the border.

I want to finish this post up by commenting on starting this blog. The requirements for my fellowship are to create two posts on my experiences, but I want to update it at least once a week. I've never blogged before, but I have done a lot of travelling - I feel like the combination of writing publicly and going to a new place, a new habit and an old habit, will balance out well.

"If God had really intended men to fly, he'd make it easier to get to the airport."                                - George Winters