Last night of normalcy

Departing Thoughts
Written 02/03/12

This piece was written before I got onto the plane for Rwanda.  It was written in a fairly rushed fashion and not edited thoroughly, so excuse the apparent lack of flow and regard it as a sprawling stream of consciousness.  Further entries will all be written from Africa, and will focus on my actual experiences.  

Tomorrow I embark on a 27 hour journey to Kigali, Rwanda.  Fittingly, I'll be stopping in Amsterdam along the way, a city I called home for 3 months in late 2009.  But this trip will be a little different.  I won't be living in a luxury furnished apartment with two young guys my age.  I won't be on a self-indulgent quest of making and spending money.  I won't be taking weekend trips to London and Rome.  Instead, I'll be volunteering my time at Gisimba orphanage in Kigali, teaching chess, basketball, soccer, tennis, and English to a group of 5-16 year old children, and in turn letting them teach me their way of life.  Then I'll embark on a 5 day safari with an old friend, before finally climbing the tallest free-standing mountain in the world

For the past 5 years or so, I've made my living playing cards.  The title of this blog references my poker alias - an amalgamation of my favourite adult beverage and my longtime childhood pasttime.   Perhaps the biggest knock against my chosen profession - and one that I've heard many times over - is that it contributes nothing to society.  Doctors help sick people, teachers educate our youth, even athletes and celebrities entertain us and small business owners give us products that improve our lives.  Poker players, one might argue, do none of this, and as such contribute nothing to society.  Ignoring my personal stance on this school of thought, let's assume for a minute that the argument is true.  The problem is that it defines a person's contributions by their profession - an obviously limiting method.

Having said that, I've likely done very little over the past few years to rid people of the perception that poker players are lazy and selfish people.  The lazy tag is one I will have to accept - I actually work extremely hard at my craft, doing a lot of away-from-the-game study, and putting in tons of hours and talking strategy with fellow players to stay sharp.  But to many people, what I do isn't work but gambling, and instead of putting in 50-55 hour work weeks every week, I haven't worked a day in the past five years.  It's an interesting semantics argument, but one that I'm not going to get into in this blog.

The second point, however, is actually quite valid.  I can't really fight the notion that my chosen profession has been a selfish one.  After all, I work hard to perfect my strategies, so that I can take money from others without directly contributing anything to society.  I work with and teach poker to many friends of mine, but that could be seen as more evil - helping to build an empire of similar-minded people.  Furthermore, and perhaps most incriminating, I have done very little to help the world, or help those in need.  I've donated some money to charity, but have spent embarrassingly few hours actually being charitable, or thinking about those in need - let alone helping them.  Indeed, I've only perpetuated the stereotype of poker players as selfish me-first creatures.

While I think it's dangerous to fall into black and white ways of thinking about our actions -- the notion that volunteering in Africa is an inherently selfless and commendable thing to do, while aggressively trying to move up the corporate ladder, or increase one's wealth is inherently unselfish* -- I do think that for me personally, this is a big step in the right direction for many reasons:

- It's unlike anything I've ever done before.  I've never been to a third world country, and only once have I volunteered for any extended period of time, and that was with my high school
- It's the longest break I will have taken from poker over the past 5 years
- It's a huge deviation from my normal lifestyle and it will be refreshing to have to break some of the habits - good and bad - that I've grown comfortable and accustomed to
- I get to work with kids for an extended period of time.  I've done some work with kids in the past - babysitting when I was younger, and teaching chess more recently - and have always enjoyed it.  Kids to me have a refreshing sense of honesty about them - never afraid to speak their mind or aware of the consequences.  This is a quality I respect and can relate to, as those who know me well can attest to.

I'm excited about this journey for many reasons.  I'm excited for the opportunity to work with and help kids.  I'm excited to see first-hand life in a third world country.  I'm excited for the opportunity for personal growth.  But most of all, I'm excited because I have absolutely no idea what to expect.  Most of my choices in life have been relatively safe ones.  I've done a lot of travel, but it's all been to safe countries, where despite slightly different cultural ways of life, my underlying way of life hasn't been threatened or challenged.

I'll be living with my mother, who has volunteered in the hospital for the last 5 years.  In that sense, it won't be a total plunge into uncertainty, as I'll be with someone who knows the way of life here, and can help direct me in both a practical and a cultural sense.  Still, listening to my mother's experiences and seeing photographs of her past trips only paints a vague picture of Rwanda in my head.  There is no substitute for experience - I've learned that saying holds true in almost any avenue in life.

When I'm done volunteering in Rwanda, I'll head to Tanzania, where I'll meet up with my good friend Dave.  I've probably hung out with Dave a total of 8 times, and this will be our 5th country together.  We met in London at the poker table and have since hung out in Amsterdam, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, and Berlin.  In fact, it was Dave that suggested we climb Kilimanjaro, without even knowing that I was going to be in Africa around the same time he was thinking for the trip.

We'll start with a warm-up safari (possibly including white water rafting), and follow it up with what will likely be the most ambitious part of this trip for me - climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.  I once did an olympic length triathlon without any training, so Kili will be a cakewalk, right?  In all seriousness, I've been behind on my training the past week - due in large part to a high level of alcoholic beverage consumption as a result of "the holidays."  Going to the gym here will hopefully be part of my daily routine.  My main focus will be to improve my cardiovascular fitness, with some focus on building leg strength as well.

I'm about to take off, so I'll leave it at that.  This entry feels somewhat rushed and jumbled, but perhaps that is fitting as it mirrors my mind - filled with thoughts but not sure how to process them or what conclusions to draw.  I'm looking forward to the next five weeks - to seeing how the experience meets the few expectations I have, to seeing what I learn, and to hopefully making a positive difference in the lives of the young kids here.  That is my main goal, and one that I will work hard to achieve.  I'll try to update this blog as frequently as possible, and will be including pictures in future posts

- Alex

* Call me a cynic, but I think that there is a sort of selfishness in any action.  IE many people volunteer because they will feel better about the fact that they are helping other people.  Perhaps they care about helping the other people, but they are also driven by the self-serving notion that they are "doing good in the world."  Many people who work hard and are greedy about money are driven by a desire to provide for their families and their good friends.  Overall, I think the latter group (self-serving businessmen) would display a higher degree of selfishness than the former (volunteers), but I think it's extremely dangerous to label one group as bad and selfish and the other as good and unselfish.  Everyone is motivated by different things, and one's actions on paper do not speak to these motivations or to one's character.