Friday, June 28, 2013
Thursday, June 27, 2013
A Place to Start
I always meant to start a blog to chronicle my journey
through the Peace Corps.
But where
to start? Ideally, from the very beginning. From the lightning moment of my
decision to depart and leave everything but a suitcase of crap behind. But I
didn't start there. This turned out to be a good thing because the first few
months would just have been a series of rants about the convoluted application
process followed by the convoluted list (read: masses of unordered information)
of tasks I needed to perform after
getting the ok to go. And these rants would be more telling of my technology
induced ADD than anything else.
Anyway,
Here I am, starting, because I've found my place.
I'm sitting in my closet, listening to show tunes and the sounds of my parents taking decorations off my walls. I can hear the echoes of my cousin/roommate conversating with her father above my head.
All my life the words "Peace Corps" have been inextricably tied to the thought of my parents and more prominently to my mother. They both served, '76 to '78, in Lesotho. (It's that tiny circle in the middle of South Africa if you don't know.) So, basically, Peace Corps = Mom and Dad. Yet, on June 1st, exactly a month before my departure date marked, concretely, the realization that when I go to Africa, I will not, in fact, run into the me-aged version of my mother.
She will still be here. In the States. Very far away from me. Peace Corps is no longer her adventure. It is mine.
Since that moment of realization I started to feel the distance between here and the end, the next time I will live close to my family and my culture. This is a feeling that I've done a pretty good job keeping at an arm's length as long as no one asks me if I'm nervous. And now, packing up my room in the house I share with my cousin and her husband/fiancé (don't ask) I am feeling it more strongly than I care to. The only thing left to do is sit in my closet and logically and calmly outline my thoughts in true wordhoardian fashion.
And now I feel better.
Anyway,
Here I am, starting, because I've found my place.
I'm sitting in my closet, listening to show tunes and the sounds of my parents taking decorations off my walls. I can hear the echoes of my cousin/roommate conversating with her father above my head.
All my life the words "Peace Corps" have been inextricably tied to the thought of my parents and more prominently to my mother. They both served, '76 to '78, in Lesotho. (It's that tiny circle in the middle of South Africa if you don't know.) So, basically, Peace Corps = Mom and Dad. Yet, on June 1st, exactly a month before my departure date marked, concretely, the realization that when I go to Africa, I will not, in fact, run into the me-aged version of my mother.
She will still be here. In the States. Very far away from me. Peace Corps is no longer her adventure. It is mine.
Since that moment of realization I started to feel the distance between here and the end, the next time I will live close to my family and my culture. This is a feeling that I've done a pretty good job keeping at an arm's length as long as no one asks me if I'm nervous. And now, packing up my room in the house I share with my cousin and her husband/fiancé (don't ask) I am feeling it more strongly than I care to. The only thing left to do is sit in my closet and logically and calmly outline my thoughts in true wordhoardian fashion.
And now I feel better.
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