entering the home stretch

“Ngoné Ndiaye! Gej naa la gis!
Mais yow foo nekkoon? Xanaa nekkofiiwoon? Defee naa ne danga dellu dekk bi té taggatoo ma!”

[Ngoné Ndiaye! It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen you! Where have you been? Were you not here? I thought maybe you went back to your country and didn’t say goodbye!]

I know, it’s been a long time.

That’s what you get when you leave site for over two weeks. It’s the longest I’d been away since last summer, when I went to the States for 3 weeks. Usually I only leave town for a few days at a time, go to the capital, visit friends. But I had good reasons to be away so long this time.

I’d planned to be gone for at least ten days, with my original training group’s 3-day COS conference in Dakar, then 2 days of All-Volunteer conference, 3 days of WAIST, with a day to get in and a day to leisurely come back to site. And then a week and a half before all that started, I ended up falling victim to what was diagnosed as carbon monoxide poisoning, and spent an extra 5 days in Dakar recovering at the PC office Med hut, before all the rest of my planned activities… (I’m pretty much better now)
And once WAIST was over I took two more days to get some things done at our PC office, and finally came back on Thursday to Joal (my site), my dusty room, and my happy host family.

[Sorry for the acronyms: COS = Close of Service
WAIST = West Africa Invitational Softball Tournament
PC = you should know by now = Peace Corps]

[for more details on our COS conference and WAIST,
check out my friend Bethany's blog ]

Two weeks is a long time to be away, and I had let myself get pretty disconnected.
Dakar, the capital, is still Senegal, but parts of it are very Western. Spending almost a week in the Peace Corps office, three days being put up in a posh hotel for COS conference (thank you, US tax dollars) and then another five days at an American-Senegalese couple’s place in US Embassy housing (thanks to the great homestay program instituted by our PC country director)… well, it honestly felt more like America than Senegal.

I suppose I needed that.
Though I have taken mini-breaks every now and then since last summer’s big “vacation”, I was feeling run down, tired, and pretty much just ready to get the heck outta here. I spent most of January feeling like I was just treading water, being physically present but mentally distant, defining in essence the ubiquitous Wolof phrase, “Maangiy fii rekk” - I am here only. I found myself at a loss for work, after the busy-ness of the past few months, yet not so eager to start anything new. Then just after New Year’s I was presented with a proposition by my supervisor to consider extending my service for another year, to be the Environmental Ed program assistant, based in Dakar.
And as run down and fed up as I felt, I almost decided to say yes.
Until I made a spur of the moment visit to a PCV friend in Thiès and realized that staying another year here would be exactly the opposite of what I want.
It’s not that this is such a terrible place - don’t get me wrong. But two years is enough.

My brain was telling me logically that I should do it, that a third year here would indeed be a good job opportunity, a potential for more growth, and so on and so on. I would have gotten a month-long paid leave to go home before starting the third year, and once back in Senegal, a nice set-up with my own apartment in Dakar, more administrative duties, more freedom and a continued PC-paid living allowance and health benefits.

But after all but making the decision to stay, I realized that it was not what I wanted.
And as one of my goals for my Peace Corps service was to stop doing things just because I think I “should”, and only do things that I really “want” to do, once I had let myself be honest and admit that what I really wanted was to go home, I felt a huge burden lifted, and knew I had made the right decision.

January was tough in many ways, but mostly in battling my own thoughts. I got up every day and went to City Hall, met with my counterpart and work partners, listened much, talked a little. But I can’t say I accomplished anything great. I managed to organize one meeting of the CCEE - Comité Communal d’Education Environnementale. But since that meeting we haven’t had another, I’ve been away, more than a month has gone by and we haven’t done anything we talked about doing during that January meeting. And now it’s almost March, and I am looking at the home stretch: finishing my service, figuring out how to give some closure to my time here, passing on projects and allowing myself to accept that it’s OK that there are things I didn’t do.

I sat down in my little corner office at City Hall yesterday (yes, technically I have an office, though it’s not where I spend most of my time) and looked at my calendar. Before we left COS conference we were supposed to choose a COS date, let the administration know when we would be closing up shop. The official COS date for my training group is May 8 - that is the date around which most of us will be leaving country. We swore in officially as volunteers on May 9, 2008, so two years after that we will have completed our allotted time. We are allowed to leave up to 30 days before or 30 days after that date, with a few exceptions, so considering when I want to be here at site for the week or so site visit in April of my incoming replacement, plus time to finish up, say goodbyes, etc, I chose May 20 as my COS date. That doesn’t mean I will be necessarily flying back to the States that day, but unless anything changes in the meantime, it will be my last official day as a PCV.

May 20. I looked at my calendar, then at my packet of COS’ing information, calculating days and timing of closing-out medical appointments, reports that will need to be written, books to be returned, goodbyes to be said. I’ll probably leave Joal a good ten days before my COS date, to get everything done in Dakar that will need to be done before I can leave. I looked back at my calendar, counting the weeks. Counting the days. Eleven weeks at site. Take out Sundays, a Saturday here and there… that leaves about 60 working days. Sixty days.
After so much time, just two more months.