The roller coaster

It's hard to keep up the semblance of normality when I know I'll be leaving in just a few weeks. But the world keeps turning and all I can do is prepare myself for the changes ahead. People keep asking me what I'm going to do after Peace Corps but I don't even want to think that far. Leaving is the first step and I can only take things one at a time.

I look back on the past two years and I can almost map the roller coaster ride that has been my Peace Corps service.

There were the months I came this close to giving up and going home, there were the days I cried and cried out of frustration and loneliness, and wondered why I even came to Africa. There were the nights I tossed and turned, couldn't sleep for all the muddled thoughts running through my head and all the strange noises overhead. There were the times in which I felt unused, unneeded, unappreciated. There were the days I wanted to hit my head repeatedly against the wall for everything that is wrong with this country.

There, then, were the points in my service in which I picked myself up, grit my teeth, got back in the game. The moments I just had to laugh at myself for being the crazy mulungu, had to accept that I'm the community spectacle no matter what I do. The realization that those infinite small accomplishments are accomplishments just the same. There were definitely the times that I felt welcomed, felt accepted, felt loved, felt needed, and those moments in which the beauty of this country and the heart of its people took my breath away.

And these latter moments, despite sometimes being few and far between, are what have made my entire two years in Mozambique worthwhile.

I know other PCV's in my group who are burnt out, over it, ready to go home. And I'm glad I don't feel that way. It tells me that I haven't been in Mozambique too long, and that I will be look back with fondness on my experience. All of this is not to say that I'm not excited to go home. I haven't stepped on American soil in over two years and I might just step off the plane and kiss the ground out of sheer joy of returning to patria amada, terra minha.

I suppose you could sum it up with this line in a Lady Antebellum song: “She couldn't wait to get out but wasn't quite ready to leave.” I'm as ready as I  ever could be, to leave a place that has claimed a piece of my heart.