April was a busy month as I was away from my site for half the month
with COS (close of service) conference and YTT (youth technical
trainings). COS conference was
amazing. We spent a week at one of
the nicest hotels in Uganda, the Speke Resort, overlooking lake Victoria, with
buffet all you can eat meals, huge dinners with appetizers and deserts I could
not come close to finishing, and several tea breaks scheduled in between. My stomach wasn’t used to so much food
in one day that unfortunately I wasn’t able to eat as much of this good food as
I would have liked to! The purpose
of this conference is to prepare the volunteers who have only a few months left
in their service for those remaining months and for life after Peace Corps. It was definitely a bittersweet
feeling, sadness knowing I will soon leave a place that I call home and people
who have become my family both within and outside of Peace Corps, but also
excitement thinking about returning to America, the land of hot showers,
constant electricity, comfy beds, no mosquito nets and lots of yummy food! As I sit here typing up this blog post,
my 2 youth I have come to know very well (Fazil and Remison) are practicing
typing using the Mavis Beacon program I also used to learn how to type
with. We try to meet at least a
few times in a week and these are the moments I look forward to every week….we
sit and joke, laugh and tease each other in Lusoga. Our friendship has come a LONG way since I first met
them. In the beginning, they had
the mindset that most Ugandans do when they first meet a foreigner – what am I
going to get from this person?
After spending time together and building our friendship, they now
realize and value the importance of gaining knowledge and skills from me and
not money. They showed me this the
other day during their youth club at school when they informed their fellow
classmates of the importance of gaining knowledge and skills to better their
future and not to have the mindset of expecting money from me. Its moments like these that I am going
to miss and wish that I had more time to spend with them. In a way I feel like I kind of got
ripped off in my Peace Corps service.
Having gone through a site change just over a year ago was a good thing,
however, I never got the full PC experience of living in one place for the full
2 years. At times, especially
recently as I think about my impending departure from this place I call home, I
feel angry and sad that I didn’t get the full 2 years with all these wonderful
people. I try to remind myself that starting off at the wrong site allowed me
to meet some pretty awesome people who I would have never met had I not gone
there first. As I remain with less
than 2 months before closing my service, I am trying to come to terms with many
things such as this and not feeling like I was extremely successful in my 2
years here. People may not
remember or put into action the things I taught them like how to properly put
on a condom or how to hang a mosquito net or how to make a re-usable menstrual
pad, but one thing I hope people wont forget is the friendships we formed, the
bonds we made and the laughs we had together. For me, what I will never forget about this journey are the
people I met along the way who made an impact on my life and have forever
touched my heart.
