Coming to an end

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.