friends and family all over the world, greetings, hello, this is isaac, i am going to embark on my journey soon enough. for those of you who occupy some of your time worrying about me, this is a great way for people to know that i'm safe, alive, adventuring, whatever i am, wherever i am... and also for those equally endangered youths spreading the earth as i type these very words, it should be a good way to correspond and see how our stories overlap and how they don't. what i've said just breaks people down into adults and twenty-somethings, basically, so as a third audience i offer any and all of you some insight on the research i'm doing, however i choose to organize it, somewhere here in the vastness of the internet.
forgive me as i haven't yet left, and i've never had a blog, so for now i am rambling without thought to how long an entry like this could reasonably be for someone to want to read in one sitting, etc...
what i mean to say is i will probably organize my greetings into a couple different categories, which any and all of you may parse through to find what / how much interests you.
for now, by way of basic introduction, i am about to leave for a semester abroad in Bamako, Mali, in West Africa, where i'll be multi-linguistically absorbing issues concerning gender and public health in this specific developing country... the last four weeks of my program will be devoted to an independent study project; the brief vision i have for mine uses farmer's markets and other food distribution systems as a jumping-off point to examine the structural comings and goings of this wide and vibrant culture which, saying this, i still have yet to encounter.
i leave in about a week
