Nice while it lasted.

So I’m headed home in about 50 days now. While I’m looking forward to see family and friends and play video games until my eyes dry into little eye raisins, I will miss some aspects of life here. Might even decide to stay another whole year! (but probably not)

I think the thing that will be missed most is my garden. Behind my hut I am currently growing; pineapple, tomatoes of the small and large variety, guava, eggplant, basil, watermelon, okra, taro root, young mango and cashew trees, and several local varieties of trees. It has been one of my greatest pleasures to awaken each morning and peruse my plants to look for bugs and remove branch starts so the plant grows how I want it too. Pruning and weeding and building little water catchers in the soil and simply watching everything grow has been so satisfying to me my whole service.

On a similar note I’ve greatly enjoyed the part of my work that focused on trees and their growth and care. Biking around through the woods and talking to farmers and teaching them about the best way to care for plants. It’s fun to talk to and teach people about something which you are passionate about.

I’ll miss the freedom I have here greatly. On any given day I can decide to stay in my room and read all morning, or go out to the woods and wander around climbing termite mounds and observing the plants and animals. I can go visit with people and chat about what they’re doing and answer questions about my own culture. Since cultural exchange is the primary purpose of Peace Corps all of these things are my work. I’ve always loved the feeling of having a plethora of options. I feel that upon returning and beginning work I’ll no longer be able to wake each morning and have the choice to read a book until lunch.

Novelty is much more abundant for anyone far from home and doubly so if outside of their original culture. My days have the potential to go very interesting directions here. On one travel trip I ended up sleeping in a car with tons of mosquitoes and it was very weird and uncomfortable. But I also had not the slightest inclination that my day was going to go in that direction. Sometimes going to the market I’ll suddenly be in a new situation that dumps a cacophony of new experiences on me. Any walk in the woods can easily turn into a “What the hell is that?!” It’s great fun to not know what to expect each day.

Everybody here is AT LEAST bi-lingual. Growing up in a community that seemed about 1 in 60 or so people knew more than one language made those people geniuses. Here I can find difficulty getting around a city without knowing a little bit of at least two languages. It’s fun to make jokes in one language that don't make sense in the other, or translate things directly and realize they don’t work. For instance the greeting in Pulaar of “How is the body” sounds very odd in English. It’s fun to say stuff to someone in a language you’re pretty certain the people around you don’t understand, or yell it to someone on the other end of a bus. “I freakin hate this bus!” I’ve always had a soft spot for etymology(study of words and their history.) I like looking at how words are used and comparing a new language with the one I am familiar with. Being bi-lingual opens up so many doors. Language provides an excellent insight into culture. English only has one word for love and then we have to specify the type, many other languages have a slew of words all describing different kinds of love. Pulaar has a word for ‘to have something in the eye’. It’s just really neat being in a bilingual environment.

The food here can be rough sometimes, but it can be fantastic at others. A really good plate of rice and oily onion sauce with chicken meat is one of my favorite local dishes. You won’t hear any complaints if a plate of oily rice, fish, tamarind sauce and vegetables with a slice of lime falls in front of me either. Steamed corn meal with watery peanut sauce, leaves, and beans has been known to disappear in vast quantities when I’m around. Taste is the third best part about the food, second best is the freshness. Most times all the ingredients were growing or moving within the last 24 hours, and have no preservatives or false colorings or flavorings. The best thing about the food though is the cost. A Peace Corps volunteer learns early to become frugal, then more frugal, and when I get a nice steamy plate set in front of me for 1 U.S. dollar… I’m very happy.

Some unique potential exists here for human interactions. An interesting aspect of this culture is that it’s respect based, while in the U.S. we base much of our interactions on usefulness. If I go to a vendor of goods or services and fail to say at least several of the formal greetings, then I’m being rude. People here don’t like being treated like a means to an end. Say hello and ask about the afternoon and the work and their family, then move onto business. Not so in the U.S. where I may say hello but then move directly into “and I’d like a small root beer.” Without electricity in much of my area people spend most of their free time sitting around chatting. I felt that back home you don’t simply sit and talk with people for very long before their staring at their phone not paying attention. It’s difficult to really feel like you’re with another person and just spending time talking and joking and getting to know them.

Some specific humans I’m very fond of. Peace Corps attracts a certain type of person and the other volunteers that I’ve had the privilege of sharing time with are so fun. Diverse and with loads of stories and experiences talking with any individual for hours can feel like minutes. They all care about something enough to have come here in the first place, and being around people that have similar interests is amazing. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made over these two years greatly when I have to return home to my deadbeat friends.

It will be less fun to have the factor of unknown reduced upon returning home. Like the day I awoke to a large scorpion right next to my bed, and then a second came in my room that night. There are so many things that could randomly happen here that home will probably be boring if there isn’t a cow trying to break into my yard at 3 am, or I randomly end up chasing a 60 strong troop of baboons with a young kid. Never knowing where the day might end up is quite a treat.

I’ll miss the challenge of not being in my own culture. When my phone rings I get a mini panic attack because I’ll need to problem solve or at least comprehend potentially important details… in another language. If I go to the market I run into problems there and they need to be thought through and overcome. I need to plan ahead to avoid dying from dehydration or sun stroke. I have to make sure I can fix my bike if it breaks when I’m on a stretch of road that has nothing for six miles in either direction. Overcoming challenges isn’t only a way to make oneself feel competent it is the best way to grow as person. I have grown quite a bit since starting here two years ago. Hopefully this will actually be posted on Sept 23 2015 which is two years to the day that I left home and started all this.

The final thing I’ll miss, at least some of the time, is a lack of electronics. Sometimes you do want to read a book or work out or do something productive or to better yourself, but then you simply watch netflix and play candy crush. One of the reasons I joined Peace Corps was so that I could remove these options and only have self improvement things to choose from. I’ll miss the times when I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work out or read a nonfiction book, but then realized they were my only options.

I’m in the mindset right now that I want to be home and playing computer games and eating cheese and meats and ice cream which I’ve been without for much of the past two years. But I’ll also be home missing the times when kids saw me and got way too excited, or when I greeted old people in their own language and they thought it terribly funny or fascinating that I knew it. Early into service another volunteer came to my road town and got off the bus, then we started greeting one another back and forth in the local language. The old man sitting down was so confused and entertained by two obvious foreigners knowing his minority language. Greeting people on a bike path from behind is always fun because they respond and then when you pass them they realize that you are NOT what they were expecting. I suppose I’ll miss being able to wear the same clothes for every day of the year and not get too cold. It’s been an adventure and I’ll be sad to have it end for these reasons, but that doesn’t mean the next thing I do won’t be an adventure.

To exemplify much of what I’ll miss I want to write a little story of one of the days I’ll have difficulty forgetting. My work partner and I had biked to a neighboring village. The bike ride was about 3km on a cool morning, it had rained recently and was still fairly cloudy. Just prior to the arrival at the village we needed to move through a flooded lowland filled with rice fields. It was very charming with the frogs croaking. After whatever it was we did at the first village we headed to a second village only a half km away and it began to rain slightly. We passed tranquil peanut and corn field with big baobab trees in them. One of the baobab trees had a big opening about 4 meters from the ground and I thought about hiding in it. We arrived at a friend of my work partners and greeted everyone in the drizzle. Then it began to rain harder and we were ushered into a metal roofed building. Some younger boys returned from the fields and unloaded ears of corn they had picked. They began grilling them on hot coals. In the meantime the matron of the house brought us a rice porridge with a soured milk/ yogurt on top. We ate breakfast while observing and listening to the rain. Chatted a little when the rain softened on the metal roof. After the shower the boys gave us an ear of corn each and we biked back to our village while nibbling fresh cooked corn. I think that was really a morning that exemplified what I came here to do as the experiences of the morning were so varied but so enticing and quaintly real. It has been a fulfilling time.