Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Taking care of business

A few short business items...

As you may have noticed, I've changed the URL to this blog to better reflect my online brand. I started the transition from starshine_diva to NailaJ a few months ago when I switched my Twitter account name. Now, all my public accounts can be found by searching for "nailaj". The sole exception in the URL game is Flickr, where my display name is now "NailaJ" but my URL remains unchanged at http://www.flickr.com/photos/starshine_diva.

So please, do update your feeds and take note. My blog is now located at http://nailaj.blogspot.com.

I've started the process of uploading my 2009 AKFC Awareness Trip pictures to Flickr for easy public viewing. Hopefully, you'll see why I enjoyed Africa so much. Next step, the videos...

... "real" blog posts to follow, I promise! Stay tuned...

Friday, September 4, 2009

Why blogging about Africa is tough

Many of you have been asking me to blog more about my trip to Africa. As you can see, that hasn't happened.

Sure, I've been busy catching up on work. I was out of town again this week too. It's not that I don't want to blog. It's not even that I don't have time to do it.

It would in theory be very simple for me to treat this as any other assignment, look through my notes from each day's visits, select a few explanatory pictures, and put together a short text on what we saw and learned.

But it's so much more than just that. It was an experience. It wasn't so much a cultural shock, at least, it wasn't different than I expected it to be. But the mounds of information we absorbed in the little amount of time we had to absorb it... I know I've said this before, but I haven't sorted it all out yet.

I want to make sure that my blogs are truly reflective of this experience. I want to share the best anecdotes with you, from the personal and the professional sides of this trip. I want to show you the most beautiful or tearful pictures so you can better understand what I mean. I want you to feel like you were right there in Kenya with me.

And until I figure out how to share all of this with all of you, I'd prefer not to post lame little textbook-style descriptions of the projects we visited in Nairobi and Mombasa. I'm not trying to be selfish. I just want to be true to myself, to my fellow tripgoers, to AKFC, and most importantly, to the efforts of all the thousands of people involved in each and every one of those projects, from start to finish.

I hope you can understand... Until then, stay tuned!