Resolution

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

Tom Stoppard

Hello, readers. I’m happy to have something definite to report! Due to the difficulties related in the previous entry and after a great deal of reflection, I have decided against continuing to pursue a third year working with an NGO here in Burkina. I will head back to the U.S. at the beginning of September. In many ways, the outcome is disappointing, but I am happy to have some exciting alternatives for the next year. I’ll be home for a month or so to reacquaint myself with la via américaine and hang out with my family before flying to India in mid-October to meet up with two Peace Corps friends, with whom I’ll travel until the holidays. We don’t have an itinerary beyond a few solid destinations and lots of potential ones. We’ll start in India and work our way east, traveling light and cheap and seeing as much as we can. I’m so excited at the prospect of seeing another region of the world and capitalizing on all the skills I’ve gained during my two years of Peace Corps service in Burkina Faso.

Having traveled a bit during my service (to Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and Morocco), I appreciate the ways in which I’ve changed as a traveler. Aside from being considerably more flexible, comfortable with uncertainty and discomfort, and travel savvy in general, I’ve also learned to appreciate travel in a new way and to approach my destination and its culture in a responsible and respectful way, perhaps more so than the average traveler. There’s nothing like two years of intense integration in a foreign culture to impress upon you the importance of cultural knowledge and respect for the very fact of being a stranger in a foreign place.

My plans for 2009 are less concrete, a reality that I am remarkably more comfortable than I would have been two years ago. I’m seriously considering teaching English abroad before beginning graduate school in 2010 and have started exploring opportunities. In any event, I’ve achieved one of the main goals that I set out to in coming to Peace Corps: becoming more in-tune with where my skills and passions intersect and identifying a future course of study that will allow me to utilize and develop those skills while pursuing the things that I’m passionate about.

Despite the frustrations of the last few months and the fact of my third year extension falling through, I am so happy for this experience and the ways in which it has changed and shaped me. I’ve seen and learned so much and, while a lot of the ideas and notions I arrived with have been altered, the idealism that remains is that much more solid for having concrete experience as its foundation.

I’ve spent much of the “summer” in Ouahigouya, a city in Burkina’s north where I am currently, helping out with the 3-month training of our newest group of volunteers-to-be. The training continues until the end of August, so I’ll spend three of my six remaining weeks here and the rest of my time saying goodbye to friends and my village. Due to rainy season flooding that resulted in the complete degradation of the 20 kilometer road to my village, I was forced to move most of my thing out already. As a result, I’ll probably only spend a few days of my remaining weeks in village, especially since my colleagues have all left village to spend the summer holidays with their families in other villages and cities and my closest friends from village now live in Ouagadougou (the capital). As I commence my goodbyes, the weight and significance of my twenty-seven months in Burkina have really started to sink in.

“That’s the tragedy of life – as I always say,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Beginning things and having to end them.”

Virginia Woolf, “The Voyage Out”

Life is short, but the art is long, the opportunity fleeting, the experiment perilous, the judgment difficult.

Hippocrates