13 August 2009

Five days to the big K - packing books

Wow. Five more days until I leave for Peace Corps service in Kazakhstan, and I'm not even done packing yet. It's coming up way too fast - I want to be able to spend some good time with my parents and sister before I have to leave, but my opportunities are getting more and more limited.

I'm currently packing books, and that's the hard part - so far I'm taking Abay Kunanbaev's Book of Words, the Bible, the Holy Koran, GWF Hegel's introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Karl Barth's the Humanity of God, Eric Hobsbawm's the Age of Empire: 1875-1914, Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Repetition and the Sickness unto Death, Robert Neville's Preaching the Gospel, Hans Küng's Christianity and the World Religions, Jürgen Habermas' On the Pragmatics of Communication, Gary Dorrien's Soul in Society, and my Lonely Planet Guide to Central Asia - and those are just my reference and work books. I'm also taking some teaching materials: and old copy of Practical English 10 and a set of Side by Side coursebooks.

Now the question is, what other books do I want to take, or should I take? Do I have room for many more? Should I take any fiction? Would it be sybaritic of me to assume that I will have time and space to be doing fun-reading while I'm over there? These are the questions going through my head at the moment.

I've just gotten back from returning the toy soldiers to the Claflins, and spending some time with them and with my sister just sort of talking about life at present for us. What's involved in Peace Corps service and what I plan to do afterward, which I can't really say right now but will probably be graduate school of some kind (either in theology or in public service).

But - yeah. Five days. Wow.

2 comments:

  1. are you going to update on this blog during the trip?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yep - that's the plan.

    ReplyDelete