Packing for Africa

Packing for any trip is hard but packing to move abroad into an unknown situation is even harder.  I have been in this position several times but never like this. Everything I need needs to fit into two pages that weight less that 50 pounds.  I decided that I would be taking one large duffle and my hard sided trunk. 

I had to shrink 22 years’ worth of stuff down to 100 pounds or less. It was amazing to see how much stuff I had acquired just over the 4.5 years of college.  I had to sort through it and decide if I was going to keep, trash or donate it.  I spent several days sorting that and condensing two rooms’ worth of stuff down to one room that is semi-organized. 

For those who know me, I mostly where T-shirts and never really thought about how many T-shirts I actually had.  I had stopped buying T-shirts at places but that did nothing to slow down my collection.  During the laundry short, I discovered that I had over 75 t-shirts.  I went though and if they were from high school they immediately went to the goodwill pile, from there the ratty shirts were made into rags.  That got right of about a third of them.

Back to packing, I was hired as an International Mobile Employee with an emphasis on the mobile part.  SLB works in over 90 counties and I could be sent to work in about 80 of them.  The ones I can’t are for the being female issues or the being a US citizen. Currently I am working 4 degrees above the equator but there is nothing stopping me from going on load to North Sea.  This makes packing hard because I had to decide what types of clothing and how much clothing of each type to bring. 

In the end, I decided that I would focus on the warm weather gear.  For the most part it was light weight clothing for work and my time off.  I threw in a jacket for air conditioned buildings but the rest of my beloved jacket collection stayed in my room in the United States.  I packed enough clothing for about a week and half between doing laundry as well as some clothing for hiking and going out.  I also threw in my sleeping bag, hiking boots, and trekking poles.  After that I was left with what other entertainment items did I want to bring.  I bought a kindle paperwhite so that had reading materials covered, other than that I brought my DVD collection, and my personal laptop.  

~And that has made all the difference.~