As my time run outs, I find that my words seem to be as well. Two weeks ago I had my farewell function for my schools, and next Thursday (well, today by the time I get a chance to post this, I suppose) I will have left Steenbok forever and ever. And I don’t know what to say. Well, that’s not true. Of course I’m still me and the words never run out, but writing about leaving just makes everything so much more real and so I keep finding excuses not to. But two weeks to go is no time to quit, so I’ll do my best.
My farewell function was…well it was just as ridiculous as I ever could have dreamed. There were speeches and poems and dance performances by various learners who had been co-opted into entertaining the crowd. A couple of girls read poems that they had written, and my schools presented me with a full “Swazi” outfit and jewelry (and by Swazi they meant covered in lots and lots of beads. Its not traditional, but it is pretty cool). I gave a speech thanking everybody, we had a big meal and headed home. The whole thing was really touching, I couldn’t believe the effort so many people had gone through just to say goodbye to me. (A very Peace Corps sort of moment: walking to the function – the first time, before they made me walk back so that I could be picked up in style 2 hours later – I saw kids of all ages running around at 9am on a Friday when they should have been in class. Why no school? Because it had been shut down for the day to say thanks to me for all the work I’d done trying to help improve school! Oh well.)
Two weeks later, of course, I’m still here, and I keep running into people in the street who seem a little shocked by the fact. “Usahlala ekhaya?” “Utomuka nini?” (You’re still here? When are you leaving?) seems to be the standard refrain from every gogo I meet. They’re not being mean, we just spent 6 hours saying farewell, and then I didn’t go. It’s weird. I hate saying goodbye, and this extended three week process is very close to excruciating. It’s like tearing the world’s most epic band-aid off one hair at a time. I’ve been trying to keep myself busy, mostly by painting another world map at my key school – this one very tiny – and slowly giving away most of everything that I own. This has to be done incrementally, since if I start giving away too much at once it turns into a feeding frenzy and I have to beat off teachers and children with sticks. Recently though I was told that everything I own “even the spoons” must go to my host family. Really I don’t want to give them anything at all – except for the girls, of course – because generally they’re just not good people*. They don’t take care of things, or people, and I know they won’t value or take care of the things I give them. Which isn’t to say it won’t start an enormous amount of dispute and bad feeling if I don’t. But the passive-aggressive in me (or maybe just the part of me that has learned to pick its battles) says: ‘Fine, less work for me to do, then.’ I’ll pack my bag, clean the room, and they can sort through it all for me.
I think I sound bitter, but maybe a better word would be melancholy. I’ve spent two years in Steenbok, and its been an amazing transformative experience for me. I’m not really sure how to say goodbye, or how to summarize two years in a few sentences. It’s been…outstanding. Literally not a day has gone by when I haven’t felt an enormous sense of gratitude and privilege for the opportunity I’ve been given, for the people I’ve worked with, and the children who have been willing to play with me and teach me about their world. For the music and the language and the sunsets. Yesterday I took the bus home from Malelane. It took an uncommon turn into an out of the way village and we bumped down a dirt and sand road at what couldn’t have been more than 15 miles an hour. There was dust blowing up from both sides of the bus, cows ambling through the veld, kids running home from school, dancing in front of their houses, arguing with their friends on the footpaths that wound through the houses. I saw a gogo walking down the road with a walking stick that reached up to her shoulder and an old wrap and t-shirt she must have bought at the Naas market. The river was off to the left, and beyond that fields and fields full of mealies, po-po, cabbage, onion, tomato, sugar cane. And beyond that the Lubombo mountains that have hemmed me in and provided backdrop and border. It was nothing, it was an ordinary day in an ordinary village not far from my home. And all I could think was, “I am the luckiest girl alive.”
*Comforting, in its way, I suppose, to know that petty and selfish people extend across all cultures. No one country has the monopoly on jerk.
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