The Agrinautica

The trip to Guinea and costs while there were covered by USAID, though the side trip to Sweden wasn't. The biggest single expense other than that was the round trip ticket LAX- Nairobi which was around $1200, the other flights between cities in the East Africa area wouldn't have been terribly much. Once in Africa the cost of life is absolutely negligible so once you've bought tickets there you're practically saving money over what you'd be spending in a developed country. Of course loss of income from not working was probably the biggest "expense" and rent would have been up since I was going to be gone for a big chunk of several months and had only recently returned from Australia so wasn't deeply entrenched in an apartment I was staying with my parents for the times between those trips that I was in the states, so I wasn't paying rent on an apartment. And I was lucky to have a job that let me come and go. But like if you compare it to 2017, in 2017 I was balancing a serious job and rent on my house and still managed to travel even more but in that case it was because I had more of the government funded projects (:

Definitely the secret is to develop skills that are valuable to projects the government wants to send you to :D