A Final Note.

Every story has an ending. Some, though, are harder to write than others. How can I sum up my last days, weeks, months in Togo? How can I even sum up the last two plus years? People like one-liners, but one-liners couldn’t do my experience justice…though for that matter neither could anything short of a book. My life was a world of opposites: challenging yet at many times routine, trying but relaxed, crowded though so often lonesome. If pressed, though, I can definitively say this much: If I could go back, I’d do it all over again. I’d take the heat, I’d take the bugs and the bats, and I’d take the bush taxi rides with chickens at my feet, goats in the trunk and people jammed up next to me in every imaginable position. I’d handle the dysentery and the amoebas, the machete mishaps, the unexplainable rashes and the falls off of motorcycles into puddles of deep, dirty water. I could manage the hawkers in the market and the scammers on the street, and all the other hassles that came with my life. All this because now I know what I only suspected three years ago when I went onto the Peace Corps website and hit that button to start my application: today’s pains lead—more often than not—to tomorrow’s pleasures. Uncertainty breeds worry in everyone, this is inevitable; but vindication ultimately arrives if you let it. Two years in an underdeveloped, forgotten, African country was never going to be easy, I knew there would be hard times and hard times there were. Yet, sitting under the shade of the mango tree outside my house on my last day in Sodo, my village, eating corn mush with tilapia from my fish pond, surrounded by villagers who first saw me as a stranger, then a friend, and finally as a local was vindication enough.

On a final, personal note thank you to all of you who didn’t forget about me. Not just those of you who sent packages and letters (though special thanks to all of you are in order), but everyone who ever gave me a passing thought. The feeling that the world has passed you by, and that those closest to you before departure have all pushed you out of their minds can easily creep into your thoughts on dark, quiet nights out there in ‘the bush’. I know that that wasn’t the case with the people in my life…thanks for that. To my friends still in Togo who might opt to use some of their precious internet credit on reading this: keep going! There aren’t many feelings quite like the one when your plane takes off after close of service…(although if your flight is at 4:00 in the morning like mine one of the main feelings may be exhaustion). And finally, if there is someone out there reading this who is thinking of taking the leap my advice is pretty simple: stop thinking about it and do it. A lot of people have passed up a lot of life changing experiences because they thought too much, try and avoid making that mistake!

Thanks to all, J.

p.s.-if you’re wondering what I’m up to now, I’m currently sitting next to a space heater avoiding the somewhat surprising cold of the High Atlas Mountains outside of Marrakesh, Morocco. Tomorrow Meghan and I are hiking around the base of the highest peak in North Africa, attempting to get by with the few long sleeved items we own. Next up is a month harvesting olives in the deep south of Italy in the Salento, or the heel of the boot, followed by a little respite in Paris to polish up our distinctly African French accents and finally to Lithuania to get back in touch with my roots before flying back from Warsaw to Chicago in time for my Mom’s birthday.

It seems that two years abroad hasn’t done much to alleviate my travel bug…