It's the night before the day

It's the night before the day. I've unpacked the rucksack, re packed it, but it still weighs more than a Datsun Cherry. I feel very crusty lobbing it on, all I need is a bandana and a hound on a piece of string. Talking of which I'm so going to miss my dog, it'll be the longest time away from her. I don't expect non-dog owners to understand because I bloody don't - yes it's ridiculous to be so attached to a creature who farts, eats, grows old and starts to smell, but strangely it's her I'm thinking of now that all is packed and quiet and the list of 'to-do's' is all scrubbed out.
I planned to spend the day knitting socks for each of the 600 odd children but those cruel, cruel men of the Inland Revenue sent a final reminder yesterday which meant most of my final hours where spent sobbing over a calculator and filling a tax return online. Happily though, I already feel welcomed by the people over there in Ghana; spoke to Laura from Ikando yesterday (she mentioned something about a roof but I couldn't get much of what she said - hope she wasn't shouting "bring a roof! we have no roof! bring a roof!”) and had an email today from a couple of volunteers already in camp, Hannah and Simon; I also have had some fabulous detailed emails from an Australian bloke who was at Buduburam recently filling me in with lots of tips like, ‘close your mouth in the shower' and 'buy your water in bulk'. Maybe I should be thinking of what work I'll be doing with the school, you know - planning - but I'm a self inflicted middle class woman of 36 who thinks Clinique is a necessity and has different mosturiser for the changing moods in weather; that rucksack is full of pills in case those pills don't work and creams for every fungus, bite and scrape ever classified. Perhaps I should be leaving this altruistic stuff to the young ones, those gappers who are lithe, flexible and constantly bouncy - I haven't bounced in a long time and I ain’t just talking about my bust folks.
The past couple of weeks I've been a bit numb about going, a bit dreamy with the odd spark of excitement and the odd beat of dread. Tonight I'm kind of the same way, I hope I wake up to reality when I get there. I seem to spend a lot of my life escaping the reality of my own life to live in other people’s, I'm in the perfect place when being another person in my work; escape and play - the best of rewards of acting and writing. But going to Ghana tomorrow to a place where 'escape' has brought Liberians and Sierra Leoneans to a settlement … to put my life on hold to experience and learn about the complexities and horrors of people displaced ... will it seem real or disjointed? I’m cacking it. I think the plan is to stick to practicalities and take them one step at a time, the reality of the reliability of a Morden cab driver picking me up on time for the airport is enough for the first step, surely things can’t get harder than that?