For anyone who doesn't keep in touch regularly, here's a brief catch-up. After living in San Francisco for 15 years and working at a number of financial services companies, the need to do something different came calling around two years ago. Ide and I saved our pennies religiously - living on dried noodles, cutting out drycleaning, restaurants, manicures (Ide), expensive gym memberships, shoes (Ide again), vacations, days off work, haircuts etc. By the time our clothes were yellowing and falling off our backs we had managed to scrape together enough cash to not work for a year (unfortunately due to a horrible mold problem in one of our houses in San Francisco this timeline has become severely truncated). We left our jobs at Wells Fargo and PayPal, and all the wonderful people we had met there, and took off for New Zealand.
Prior to our two year fast we made lists of the top things we wanted to do in life. Some of them overlapped - like living in London for a year and crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian railroad, and some didn't - like going to a greyhound race and rabbit hunting (Ide) or visitng the DMZ on the border of North/South Korea (me) - although gradually many of these goals have merged together. One of our shared goals was 'volunteer in a foreign country' and so we have combined this with one of mine - 'visit Sierra Leone' - and on April 21st, 2011 we set off to Sierra Leone to volunteer as teachers' aids in two of the poorly resourced schools in the Goderich district just out of Freetown. The volunteer program is called "Extra Mile". Unfortunately the people here will throw rocks at you for taking photos of them, so I hope that a verbal account of our travels will be sufficiently descriptive. Wish us luck!
(P.S. Typing and spelling are bound to be atrocious as this internet cafe is unbeliebably slow and the keyboard is from the 1980's.)
