Stop Bugging Me for Deep Thoughts

I have one week left at site. One week to pack away two and half years of stuff, to finalize projects at work and to say goodbye to friends. And I mean that in a matter-of-fact way, even if it seems to drip with sentimentality. It’s a short amount of time to get a lot done.

I feel suddenly pressured to reflect on everything, to talk about my feelings, to generate some concise and meaningful observations about life that might fit in a fortune cookie or on a bumper sticker. Admittedly, some of the pressure is internal. In any case, summing up any two and half years is a difficult exercise.

Yesterday, I met a Peace Corps Volunteer from SA17 placed in Venda and doing her site orientation this week (you are pardoned for forgetting that my group was SA14). She seemed nervous. It made me reflect on how I got here, what my own site orientation had been like and how I had felt in her shoes. My sense is that it wouldn’t have been half so easy without Thula. Day 1 she invited me to a soccer game, we made it on prime time television and that was pretty much it. Easy sailing. She showed me the ropes, the ins and outs of Thohoyandou, installed me in a jumping social scene and schooled me in the gray arts of negotiation.

A couple months ago, she got in a car accident. The story is not mine to tell, though I wouldn’t be surprised if she commented on it in this forum herself, but it was a serious accident, she was hospitalized and she is recovering in typical Thula fashion: upbeat and funny. I guess this last blog transmission, as my brother likes to call them, is dedicated to her. I wish I could be half so brave.

Okay, here’s my deep thought, less a pearl of wisdom and more a turd you might get stuck on your sandal in the back alley behind the School of Athens:

Everyone has bad days everywhere.

I think this to myself whenever I am in danger of thinking something ignorant because things don’t turn out my way.

In conclusion, an anticlimax: this probably is not the last blog transmission at all! And! Buffy wasn’t a vampire slayer at all – she was actually insane and institutionalized! Season 6 was weird. Ahem. Max and I will be going on a road trip in a couple of weeks and I hope to update the blog whenever I have access to the internet, hopefully more often than I have been. A sketch of the itinerary: a 2 month rough figure eight, up through Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Tanzania, back down through Malawi, Mozambique and finally to Jo’burg for a 11 June departure to London.