Cue the Ghostbusters theme music, grab your girl for the last dance, and lets start taking the table centerpieces before someone else gets the good ones, cause this party is about over. Two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cabo Verde have gone ridiculously fast. When I got here, I imagined that two years would go ridiculously slow, according more to Afrikan time, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. Either way, here I find myself at the end of my service, saying goodbye to the community of Cachaço, to my island home of São Nicolau, to this identity confused archipelago Cabo Verde, a little bit Afrika, a little bit Europe.
Past PCV’s mention the kinds of questions they got when returning home, which mostly boiled down to “How was it?”. How do you answer a question that asks about how living in a foreign culture, learning a new language, becoming a part of a rural community, working on projects that were successful and failures, and all the in between, when the answer that the person is basically looking for is a one liner: It was good.
It’s hard to explain, it’s hard even for me to understand what these two years have been, for myself or for those whom I have lived with and interacted with. The bureaucratic aspects of PC looks for quantifiable things: number of people taught, number of things built, etc. That’s the government side of Peace Corps, and not the aspect of it that matters, either for the people we come to assist or to the volunteers themselves. It’s the friends, understanding a joke in a foreign language, making a joke in a foreign language, having locals realize after two years that you aren’t a tourist, haggling in the market, the frustrations of life in a place where development and motivation are different concepts to that which an American understands them to be… Being a Peace Corps Volunteer, at least to me at this time of Peace Corps, is about the little daily interactions and daily conversations the PCV has and not the number of students taught, but the one that learns, the one that remembers your name years after you have gone
I don’t know if I would be where I am today if not for having served in the Peace Corps, maybe yes, maybe no. But for over two years I feel I have been part of something amazing, whether in the Peace Corps aspect or simply my own personal aspect. So I’m ready to move on, to take what I have given and gotten from this land and these people, to continue along the cycle and see where I go. I hope to continue documenting the things I discover through this blog, albeit in a different pretense, to share the wonders I come across, information, different ways of seeing, being, thinking, living, loving.
Together with the failures and successes, thank you for everyone who has helped, I hope you too have felt that you played a part in something bigger. Whether through buying a t-shirt, sending me letters, or much needed vegan food stuffs, thanks.
Wonderful to depart!
Wonderful to be here!
The heart, to jet the all-alike and innocent blood!
To breathe the air, how delicious!
To speak--to walk--to seize something by the hand!
To prepare for sleep, for bed, to look on my rose-color'd flesh!
To be conscious of my body, so satisfied, so large!
To be this incredible God I am!
To have gone forth among other Gods, these men and women I love.
No comments:
Post a Comment