Living Hard Corps: My Experiences as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda: Saying Goodbye

About six months after I arrived in Uganda, a group of health and agriculture Peace Corps Volunteers closed their service and headed home. The remaining PCVs, myself included, greedily grabbed up everything they left behind and I inherited a tattered, well-worn pair of red Tom’s.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been giving away everything I own, bit by bit. It’s strange to see Lindsey wearing the v-neck purple shirt I brought from home, and Kelsey wearing the gray parachute pants I picked up in Turkey, and Airi wearing the floral skirt I found buried in a mountain of clothes laying on a tarp at a market in Fort Portal.

I am going home on December 18^th. I am going home next Saturday. I am going home in 7 days. I know that I am going home. I have known for a long time now. But I haven’t been ready to admit it. I haven’t been ready to say goodbye.

My life in Uganda has been complicated and simple and beautiful and awful and invigorating and devastating and enlightening and miserable. It has been everything. And the thought of trying to explain this everything, to leave this everything and all of the people who understand its everything-ness has been too much. Just too, too much. And so I pretend. I pretend that Jenna and Andre will end up living in Utah. I pretend that I’ll visit Linda in another state once a month. I pretend that Heidi and I will miraculously learn to love talking on the phone and will chat at length every night. I pretend that I’ll get a part-time consulting job with Peace Corps Uganda and be back in a few months to see all of my friends who remain in country for another year or more. I pretend that I’m not hugging Eric or Amanda or Ravi or Paul for the last time. I pretend that my Ugandan friends, my community, will still be there in 8 days. That Tracy and Edeth and I will drink soda at Tracy’s house, surrounded by kids, soon. That Miracle will sit next to me in church the Sunday after Christmas. I pretend and pretend and pretend.

And I think about my work here. I wonder if I am pretending about it too.

Tomorrow is the last day of technical pre-service training. I have spent the past month with a group of people who have seen me bravely journey into connection; back out of connection. Into fear; out of fear. They made me a book. A rhyming, adorable book that was signed in red thread. They don’t know, couldn’t know, how many crucial, beautiful moments in my life hang on books. My heart is book shelves. They wrote me a book and I love it. And I love them. And somehow, picturing Lindsey and Kelsey and Airi in my well-worn clothes warms me. Imagining Megan resting her head on my giant feather pillow soothes me. Closing my eyes and remembering the red yarn tied loosely around the wrists of the people I love and wrapped firmly around my heart comforts me.