This week was a difficult one, filled with a lot of different emotions. I cleaned out my office this week. I cleaned out my filing cabinet (my drawer) and arranged all my old projects into clear plastic cases for the new volunteer. I threw out the old exam papers and project documents. I took down the student art from my walls. For the first time, it really hit me that we were leaving soon. I of course, started to cry.
I started packing up the house on Thursday night. Took our pictures out of the frames, made piles of books and items to give away, and started sorting through all the papers tucked away into cabinets. It's so hard to determine what you can take with you, and what you must leave behind. Instead of taking Farid's spanish books, we opted to just donate them to the resource center at the Ganja Education Information Center, and bought used ones from Amazon.com instead. Most of the household items that we've purchased will go to site mates, or left behind for the site mate that is moving into our house when we leave. All of the things that made a home look like a home, are now being packed up and given away. The house feels empty already.
To top it off, today is our last official work day at GEIC. Both Farid and I are finished today. In the coming week we will come in to say goodbye, to get our letters of recommendation from the Director, and we will come to check email... but it's not the same. I've been here for more than three years now. Realizing that I will have no more projects to plan here, no more events to host, no more American holiday celebrations to prepare for... it all seems so final. In 11 days, I will no longer be a United States Peace Corps volunteer.
For those of you at home that are not RPCVs, you might not understand the importance of this chapter closing. Being a Peace Corps volunteer is so much more than just a job. It's an identity. Although we all come from different places in the U.S., we have different backgrounds, different interests, and different lives, we have one thing in common: our ability to spend more than two years (three in my case) giving our lives to the persuit of trying to make one small part of the world a better place. Whether that's through helping a business to be more successful, helping a student to finally understand the difference between "How are you?" and "How OLD are you?", helping youth to improve their lives through work and life skills building, or just helping people to understand the importance of a healthy lifestyle or environment, we come here to serve strangers; and we eventually leave here leaving behind friends and new families. It is hard to walk away from three years of my life. My energy, my creativity, my heart and my soul are in this place, it's hard to just walk away.
I know that many people leave their countries of service, making promises to return one day. Those promises mean so much to people here. They wait, and they wait, and they talk about us for years to come. The new volunteers feel like they will never measure up. But the new volunteers will earn their places in the hearts of the community in the same rights of passage that we endured. But unlike those volunteers who never make it around to coming back, I can go home knowing that I will return here some day. I am fortunate to be taking home an Azerbaijani husband, so I will feel the connection in so many ways. We will return some day to see family, friends and so many familiar faces. Although this chapter is closing, I must say that it is perhaps the best one I've had yet. I am so grateful to have had the experiences I've had. I'm coming home a very different person than what I left, and that makes me wonder if I will ever see the world the same again. Perhaps not, but I know one thing for certain... I like who I've become, and I like my new identity: Returned Peace Corps Volunteer.
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