Out of Africa

This is it! This is the last blog post that I will write from South Africa for the foreseeable future. Today is the last day of our Peace Corps service!

It's time to move on. I'm sitting here in the Peace Corps office watching the minutes pass until they will take us to the airport and eventually we will board a plane that will take us back across the Atlantic Ocean, the Tropic of Capricorn, the Equator, and the Tropic of Cancer back to Pacific Northwest where in the next month we hope to travel to see our friends and family who we have missed so much during our time here. So much is going through my head that I am not sure what to say or to write about. Liz has already shared the things she will miss and won't miss about this place and my own list doesn't differ too much from hers. I have already shared about some of the challenges we found ourselves facing at our school but I don't want to focus on that either.

We are leaving because it is the right thing for us to do right now. The job search continues slowly but optimistically as we have both been short-listed or interviewed for a number of positions. It would have been nice to get a job offer before we leave, but staying seems to decrease the chances of getting that offer. Human resources is relying so heavily on the internet these days that I have just not had the patience for it while living in a rural Africa. It's hard to write a really good cover letter when your day-to-day life challenges your self-confidence and self-esteem. Our own health and safety and the strength of our relationship with each other are high priorities in our life and over time, throughout all the challenges we faced, we have put pressure on those things and it has been getting harder and harder to see the rewards of our service.

In the past week, we have returned from another wonderful South African vacation and reported to Peace Corps headquarters to resign. As you may imagine, there are all sorts of bureaucratic hoops to jump through and bells to ring before we make it home but we have jumped through them with alacrity and with a sense of loss. We were flattered that a number of staff were suprised to see us here resigning, implying that they had always had great faith in us completing our service. We have had many goodbyes from friends and colleagues we will miss. We have provided stool samples, blood samples and been given instructions as to how to eradicate traces of malaria from our bodies. We have met with the Country Director and enjoyed her gratitude and hope for our future. All in all it has been a pleasant week.

Before we left for holiday we felt ready to get out of South Africa. After our holiday we felt sad to leave South Africa but still looked forward to ending our Peace Corps service. Now I feel more ambivalent. I wish that things had worked out better for us and that we could have continued on and even extended our service for a 3rd year. I am nervous about readjusting to life in America and about having to rely on the generosity of friends and family when we arrive there. We have learned to navigate this culture, to give others the benefit of the doubt, to say 'hello' in 4 different languages, to appreciate our privileges and opportunities, and to not have to know why things are the way they are or even what the hell is goin on. We are nervous that the US will seem a foreign place to us.

We've also had time to contemplate on the successes of our service. We have thought about the individual lives we've touched. I have enjoyed sharing culture with our colleagues and with strangers we meet and I think there is a real value in that as part of the Peace Corps' mission. While changing sites to a new area with a different language and culture was a bit of an adjustment, I feel lucky to have been able to see the way things are in different places and to get a more well-rounded picture of South Africa. I think about how we've made an impact on the Peace Corps South Africa organization through our participation in training and development events. I think about the few who have visited us here who will go back and share how South Africa is a wonderful place to travel. I think about how I have grown as a person and how my partnership with Liz has been strengthened. I think about the many who have read this blog and have shared that it interested them or prepared them for coming into their own Peace Corps adventure. I think we have done this thing right and it's time to go before we jump the whale as they say.

So I want to thank those that have supported and sheltered us here and they are too many to name and have provided us with too many different kinds of support for us to understand. They will be missed as well as kept track of and until we meet again I say Siyabonga Kakhulu, Re a leboga, Baie Dankie, and Thank You Very Much!