It’s weird to think that I won’t be seeing any of this anymore. That I will no longer be waking up to the sound of a river and the smell of a wood burning stove. Although I won’t miss all the mangy dogs barking and sniffing around for food I am going to miss the confused cockerel that goes off at 2.30am everyday. I am going to miss the geckos that crawl around the house catching the bugs and I am going to miss my hammock time. But this is all stuff of routine, I also am leaving the village where everyone knows your name and who are almost always happy to see you, to go back to a place where no one even looks at you if they can get away with it.
I think that it’s going to be weird to go back to a world where I don’t feel so useful. Working here; where you’re so involved with the communities and the people you are trying to help, it is very easy to see how what you are doing is helping. People appreciate you and the work that you do and they go out of their way to tell you so. There’s no appraisal system, employee of the month, pay scale, no patronising team meetings of group emails and surprise surprise I don’t miss any of that.
On the other hand there’s almost no personal space, practically everything you do is the knowledge of the entire village within 20 minutes and lets be honest there is next to no support or money for anything. Oddly though, that’s kind of what I like about it. At least it is a challenge.
I have realised at many points this year that the one thing that characterised my life before I came here was boredom, and boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Here, I may have been frustrated, I may have been lonely at times, but I have rarely been bored. I never feel like what I am doing is completely pointless and know that I am going to miss that feeling.
I have so much more to say about this place and my experiences here. For all my writing and thinking I think it will be a long time before I really start to piece together how much his experience has affected me.
I know that I will probably adapt to the so-called ‘big’ changes pretty quickly, the food, the weather, and the time difference. But just like when I got here, little by little, the rest is going to come out at the times I least expect it. I feel like I discovered a lot about my own culture this year, but living in another one for so long I am starting to wonder if culture isn’t a cumulative process. I wondering what pieces of my own culture I have had to confront and drop this year just to get along. At the same time what little bits of this culture I have adopted and will retain as my own.
Leaving the village for the last time I think what finally started to dawn on me is that when I get back it’s probably going to feel even more different than I think its going to, and the second more scary realisation is that I can’t really expect anyone to understand.