I returned to Ouagadougou from Benin the day before the Close of Service Conference for my training group (G27) began. The conference was held to review the tedious process of completing our service, to prepare us for life after Peace Corps (aka the "real world"), and to offer us an opportunity to provide feedback to the office. All in all, it was a really helpful three days, although it was extremely overwhelming to think about resumes and job interviews after spending so long living and working in a village, which is about the polar opposite of what most Americans consider "work."
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| G27 at staging in Philadelphia October 2012 (top) and G27 at COS conference in Ouagadougou August 2014 (bottom) |
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| Condom water balloon toss |
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| Self defense class |
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| Closing ceremony celebration with live music! |
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| Camp photo (Ibrahim in front of the sign) |
On the last day of the camp, I got a phone call from the head nurse of Peace Corps. She informed me that my request to COS (Completion of Service) early had been denied, as the office was no longer accepting medical reasons as an excuse to leave 90 days early as opposed to the normal 30 days.
What medical reasons, you ask? For those of you who don't know, I've struggled with back problems since playing water polo in high school. While my back bothered me on and off throughout college, I was able to manage it with exercise. The same was true for most of my Peace Corps service, but in April, the accumulated stress of living in Burkina Faso caught up with me. Between sleeping on bad mattresses or the floor, using horrible, jarring transport, playing soccer in bad shoes, biking with heavy backpacks, not having access to ice.......the list could go on for a while But I had committed to serve for two years and wanted to see the soccer camp through to completion.
On that Friday, I was given a choice to either deal with my back issues until November 14 and officially complete my service, or medically separate from Peace Corps, see an orthopedic doctor, and get some good ol' physical therapy. I chose the latter, primarily because I had determined my back problems would never be resolved in Burkina after developing my own stretching and physical therapy routine which I did twice a day for 3 months. As Burkinabe like to say "Sante avant tout" (Health before everything). At the end of the day, there's no practical difference between what I wanted and what I ended up getting, except for the fact that I left Burkina two weeks earlier than I had planned and it says I "ended" instead of "completed" my service on my DOS (Description of Service).
It's hard to believe that I began this journey over 23 months ago. It's safe to say that it was one of the most difficult and transformative experiences of my life. There's a Peace Corps advertisement that claims "Leaving is the hardest part," which I always thought was a cruel joke, similar to the dark humor of the sign in the transit house in Ouaga that says "Just Another Day in Paradise." But saying goodbye to the people I truly cared about in village was much more difficult than I expected. I didn't entirely realize who had made a positive impact on my experience until I looked them in the eyes and told them I was leaving.
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| Wish Burkinabe smiled in pictures so you could see Lucien's! |
There was the yogurt man in the market village, Lucien, who always had cold, sweet yogurt when I arrived, drenched with sweat from the bike ride. He had one of those big, warm smiles that immediately puts you at ease. He would always offer to charge my electronics, as he knew that I didn't have electricity in my village. He always invited me to watch soccer: an invitation that I didn't get to accept as often as I liked because it was dangerous/impossible to bike back to my village at night. He was a truly kind man and never asked for anything from me, content to just be my friend. He was blown away when I offered to give him a flash drive of American music the last time we saw each other. Unfortunately, he didn't have email so I have no way to stay in contact with him. I imagine he's listening to some of that music on his stereo system, probably skipping 90% of the tracks.
There was Madame Zerbo, the owner of the store where I purchased all of the essentials to cook food for myself. She was the nicest lady, and one of the only people I met who was actually good at teaching Djula, the regional language. Even though I never got very good at it, she still lit up every time I asked for something in Djula instead of French.
And of course, saying goodbye to Ibrahim was not easy. He was really the only person in village I felt close with. He was extremely intelligent and had developed an ability to empathize, a rare and valuable quality among Burkinabe. While he was working in Banfora for most of my service, he was an amazing counterpart when I did do projects with him. It was pretty heartbreaking when he asked when I would be coming back. The truth is I won't be back to Burkina Faso for a while. Fortunately, he has an email address and access to internet cafes in Banfora, so we should be able to stay in contact
During my last week in Ouaga, I also had to say goodbye to some of the best friends I've ever had. These people (not all pictured) are the main reason I was able to serve in the Peace Corps for as long as I did. We shared our successes and (mostly) our frustrations, somehow comforted by the fact that we were all struggling through similar circumstances.
How do I feel about the end of my service? A couple months ago, I read an article in the New Yorker during which Sasha Frere-Jones interviews Ag Leche, the bassist of the West African Tuareg band Tinariwen (I highly recommend their album Emmaar). The interviewer tried to get Ag Leche to explain the underlying emotion of Tinariwen's music, and ran into some linguistic complications, but eventually arrived at a beautiful conclusion.
"The term he used to describe Tinariwen's music was 'assouf' which our translator rendered as 'nostalgia.' Something seemed off with this word, and after several minutes of wrangling we arrived at the Portuguese 'saudade' and he lit up. He described meeting a Portuguese musician and having roughly the same conversation. He described the feeling as being 'between happiness and sadness,' and 'it is the sound of having endured something acutely unpleasant, leaving the person to bask in the complex joy of having survived, even though further hardships lie ahead.'"
While I wouldn't necessarily describe Peace Corps service as "acutely unpleasant," the type of complex feeling Ag Leche described was very familiar to me. His insight inspired me to keep track of the emotional spaces and feelings that characterized my time in Burkina. After returning, I've narrowed the list down and tried to cut out the cheesy metaphors, even though at times I was literally having to navigate "the space between two banks of a stream," or deal with the consequences of "the space between what you remember about last night and what you don't." Anywho, here's what I came up with:
Spaces Between
Somewhere between happiness and sadness
Somewhere between living in the moment
and wishing you were somewhere else
The space between who you are and who you want to be
The space between where you are now and your destination
The space between you and the people you love
The space between the beginning of a journey and the end.
The feeling of being entirely alone even though you are surrounded by people
The feeling of understanding nothing even though you are expected to know
The feeling of utter frustration with something you cannot change
The feeling of having endured something extremely challenging,
leaving you to bask in the complex joy of having survived,
even though further hardships lie ahead
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| Home, Sweet Home |
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