A flash at the final hour

My home for the last two years has been a brick box 4.5m wide and 5 meters long. The walls are white, but stained, the roof thatch, and the floor, cement. There is a dresser, a bed, a table, a couple of chairs, and a bookshelf.

My clothes are scattered in that beat-up dresser, and there is a backpack and duffel bag on the floor, which within a few hours will be full with all the detritus of my life worth taking back to the states.

I suspect the silliness whirling through my head is the same stuff most PCVs experience. The speed with which these last few days are passing by is unreal.

I’m sad and nostalgic, of course. It’s almost impossible to believe that I won’t wake up to the loud bellows of cattle and harassed squawking of the chickens that have pushed me to the brink of sanity – over and over again – these past two years. It just seems silly that I won’t walk out of this little cement square and find Tesho and his pot belly waiting to have terere, or Ña Dora cooking.

I have spent these last few months filled with frustration and anger at my community, at the procrastination and inability of my friends here to get stuff done. I’ve been angered by what I’ve seen as my personal lack of effectiveness, and by the indifference of people even as I’ve gone to bat for them.

But then, in the last few weeks, people started talking about me leaving and about the new volunteer coming. Little things started coming together, and I realized that how much I would miss the kilometers-long walk from Caballero to my site. I realized how much I would miss just sitting beside some of these people and sharing a laugh over some absurdly stupid joke, or having my 20^th conversation that day about the weather.

And then a few days ago, I walked to Caballero and built a fogon with Alejandra, the volunteer who lives closest to me. While we were walking to the house where we would be working, she asked, “If you could have any other person’s site in your G (the group of 49 people I swore in with,) where would it be, and why?”

That’s when it really hit me. She lives in a beautiful community on a wide plain set below a verdant ridge running westwards. But it doesn’t come close to Potrero. Despite all of the frustration, the difficulty, the insecurity – there’s nowhere else I would have rather spent my two years.