Twenty Days To Go

There are now twenty days until Zambia.

At some point over the last few months, the countdown stopped feeling theoretical and started feeling alarmingly specific. Twenty days is no longer "later this year"; it's this month. It has reached the point where buying something online requires me to ask whether it'll arrive before I leave. It's close enough that I can no longer reassure myself there is plenty of time to get organised, which is unfortunate because there are still several things I need to organise.

For a long time, the trip occupied a curious place in my life. It existed comfortably in the future, surfacing every now and then in the form of a vaccination appointment, a fundraising update, another email from African Impact or an increasingly alarming packing list, before quietly disappearing beneath the ordinary business of everyday life. Committee meetings still needed preparing, university assignments still had to be written, laundry stubbornly refused to do itself and the endless collection of small administrative tasks that seem to define adulthood carried on regardless.

Lately, though, something has shifted.

Zambia is no longer waiting patiently in the distance while life happens around it. It has begun to move into the foreground, and I've realised that I'm thinking less about getting there and more about what happens once I arrive.

Not in the grand sense.

I've become increasingly suspicious of anyone who claims they're going to change the world in three weeks. The world is a complicated place, and meaningful change rarely arrives on a convenient timetable.

Mostly, I hope to be useful.

I hope I can contribute something worthwhile to the communities I'll be working alongside. I hope the fundraising helps projects that genuinely need support, that I spend more time listening than talking, and that I learn at least as much as I did in South Africa ten years ago.

If I'm honest, I also hope I come home understanding something about the last twenty years that I don't understand today. I don't know what that understanding looks like yet and if I did there'd be very little point making the journey.

Positive Impact 20 began as a way of marking an anniversary, but somewhere between the first fundraising page, the vaccination appointments and the growing pile of travel documents, it quietly became something else. Less a commemoration and more an opportunity to say thank you in the only way that felt meaningful to me, by trying to turn gratitude into something practical.

When I was diagnosed in 2006, I spent a great deal of time wondering what happened next.

At twenty years old, I couldn't possibly have imagined the answer. I couldn't have predicted the people I would meet, the friendships I would build, the places I would travel or the causes that would become important to me. I certainly couldn't have imagined that, two decades later, I would be preparing to return to southern Africa as part of a project that only exists because of everything that happened in between.

Life has a habit of producing plots that would probably be rejected for lacking credibility.

Thank goodness.

So, twenty days to go.

There are still forms to complete, things to pack and details to finalise, and I have very little doubt that I've forgotten something important. I usually do.

For the first time, though, preparation no longer feels like the most interesting part of the story.

Arrival does.

After all these months of planning, that feels rather wonderful.