Proud and terrified

[DFW]

My younger daughter is in her first year of law school.
She applied for a program that takes only a very few,
as in somewhere between two and five, students to
work in volunteer programs in Africa over the summer.
First year students are rarely chosen. It seems that the
students from her law school are particularly appreciated
by the program as well as the locals, more so than the
Harvard and Yale types, I don't know why--maybe they do
a better job of selecting the right young people for the program.
She is at Pace Law School, where Bobby Kennedy, Jr. teaches.

At any rate, my daughter just emailed me to be ready to pick
up the expense (just in case I had forgotten I'm a parent) for a
trip for her to either Sierra Leone or Tanzania this summer.
Neither is exactly a bastion of calm or cleanliness. In fact,
She'll need to get inoculated against more diseases than I
could even guess exist. Plus, neither country is known as a
bastion of safety. Of course, I won't stand in her way--she's
22 years old, for Pete's sake. But even though getting
selected for this program is an incredible honor, and it
demonstrates that wiser heads than mine have determined
that she possesses exceptional intelligence and maturity, the
thought of her going off to places like that scares the living
expletives deleted out of me.