New Passport

Yesterday I picked up my new passport from the US Embassy in Kampala. It was a fairly easy process to renew here involving two early morning trips to the Embassy. Living overseas my passport has become one of my most important possessions and one I closely guard. Besides letting me in and out of Uganda, my passport has my work permit which makes it legal for me to live and work here. I am a little sad to say goodbye to using my old passport, it has been so many places with me. My two passports side by side:

I just looked through my old passport and it contains country stamps for these places: England, Austria, Uganda, South Africa, Lesotho, Ghana, Rwanda, the Netherlands, Tanzania, France, Ukraine, Morocco, and countless re-entry stamps to the USA. Obviously some of the places have multiples, especially Uganda and Rwanda.

Now looking at my brand new passport without a single stamp in it, I wonder- what it will hold? I know I will get my work permit transferred over and I'll have one more trip to the States while I am here, and one more trip to Rwanda. My new passport expires is 2021, hard to imagine where life will have taken me at that point! Here are my side by side pictures from 2002 and 2011:

Where will I be when the next picture is taken? What will my now empty passport look like? In 2021 I will be 42! It is exciting to think about those years ahead and the new adventures they may contain.

I'll end with a quote by one of my favorite authors, Jhumpa Lahiri, that sums up how I feel thinking about the last 10 years and travels:

"There are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."