I think I was much better at making blog posts when I was a PCV than now when I'm actually working. (Sorry mom) Why is this? I think in Peace Corps I just inherently had better/funnier stories. I think also, now that I'm working-working, its a little bit less appropriate for me to (gently) poke fun at what I do every day, since most of that takes place in fairly legitimate offices. Plus, while my job is FANTASTIC, and I love just about every second of it, its really not a good one to discuss in a public forum. Feel free to email me in private if you're really that curious about what I do.
Oh, also, the blog stuffexpataidworkerslike.com does a WAY better job of summarizing my daily life than I ever could. So I leave a lot of it to them.
As of today, I have 29 days left in my favorite tiny mountain kingdom. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it will be nice to be back in the states. I miss my family and friends. At Erin and Roy's wedding I realized just how much I miss a lot of really wonderful people who I went to school with and how much I want to do a better job of staying in touch with them. I miss the variety of America, and some days I miss being invisible. But... (sorry again mom, there's a "but") I've been emailing back and forth with a friend of mine who did her own stint away from the US for a while. She said, "aren't you excited to move back to America for good?!" And I thought..."Wait? For good? Who said anything about for good? I'm moving back to America for now." I felt the reverberations of a distant, mini panic attack. I've lived in southern Africa on and off for over three years now. I've been a college graduate (an "adult" if you will) for six years. I'm just as good at being a grown-up here as I am at being a grown-up in America. Maybe better. I love what I do here. I love the variety and the absurdity and the slight-to-major challenge that comes with getting just about anything done here. I like it here.
Three vivid memories, or memories of phrases, stick with me from my very first week in Peace Corps, my first week in South Africa. I remember sitting on the bus leaving the Jo'burg airport, trying not to start crying hysterically, and thinking over and over, "I'm 10,000 miles from everyone I love and everyone who loves me." Over and over again. I couldn't get that sentence to leave my head. And then, we got to our first training site, and we spent a week listening to bull roarers and singing coming from an Ndebele initiation school in the hills behind us, and I wrote my parents a letter. I told them, "I'm falling in love with this place, and I never expected that to happen." Which is corny and kind of cliché, but was also true. And I remember sitting in my freezing rondavale, with the other PCVs who would really soon become the people whom I loved and the people who loved me. I re-read Stardust, the illustrated version, and I hit the part where Tristran Thorn gets ready to walk across the wall and into Faerie, and "he knew if he turned back now, nobody would think any less of him" and he went anyways. It was the perfect sentence in the perfect paragraph in the perfect time. About walking into the unknown but knowing it was right.
And here I am now, four years later. I'm still 10,000 miles away from so many people whom I love, but now I love being in this place too. I have people who I care about here, too. I love walking into the unknown every day.
I'm looking forward to new challenges in America, and being with so close to so many people who matter to me. But I also am already planning how to come back here again just as quick as I can. So in 29 short days, I'm coming back to America.
For now.
1 comment:
Honestly, Becca, this is not a surprise.
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