Joie de Vivre

Thought I'd share a recent dream with you...
I dreamt that I had died, or more accurately, had been killed. It was some kind of shock - possibly electric - but I knew it was coming and it was unavoidable. It hit me when I entered a certain room or pressed a certain button, but I had no choice not to enter or not to press it - it was inevitable.
And somebody close to me was dead before me, and others close to me were following, set to die shortly after me.
But when I was killed, that was not the end - either of me or of the dream (as so often the case). I continued to live a normal, yet hard, life, constantly in fear that rigor mortis would petrify me. It stalked me, or more, it hunted me. If I rested, was still, if my heart rate dropped, it would start to take hold. I knew if I slept I would be finished.

I'm not a big one for reading too much into dreams (although I read an interesting point recently, something like this - every human faculty serves a purpose. Every human being dreams. There must be a reason for the brain to be active in this way while the body sleeps, or else evolution, Darwinism, would have put an end to it. But rather than us dreamers becoming extinct, survival of the fittest saw our non-dreaming ancestors perish. Interesting.), but perhaps this particular dream is an affirmation of my belief that to survive we need to keep running, keep moving, keep learning and keep loving. And from reading the previous LAD blogs, it seems that this belief is common.

For those who don't know, I'm currently fighting my way through life in Tanzania. I live in poverty, no doubt, but not in the kind of extreme poverty which is all around. While I live on around 2,000 shillings a day (c. 80p), occasionally treating myself to a glass of cultured milk for protein, others around me are living on less than 500 shillings.
But I love it. I teach two days a week and I'm currently organising school events with local police and doctors, to run during the UN's first Global Road Safety Week. I've been invited to write for a national English-language newspaper, am overseeing the development of a road safety campaign in partnership with the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Vodacom, and next weekend will be running the Kilimanjaro Half Marathon. Hopefully within the next couple of months I'll start doing some recce-ing for a UK tour company - it'd be nice to have a bit of cash coming in!
I love the freedom that I have to do what I want, plus it's great that my white face gets me into pretty much any office in the country.