It is a moment every Peace Corps Volunteer anticipates with equal parts excitement, dread, and enveloping nausea – receiving our Close-of-Service (COS) dates. It is a rather arbitrary date, yet a date that marks the end of a life chapter – a 27 month saga branded by incredible freedom, personal growth, and the general sensation of having every fiber in your body set on fire by each loss, triumph, heartache, and celebration. COS also marks the beginning of a new chapter – a new chapter manifested in the return to the mundane and predictable realities and responsibilities of “real life.” As a whole, my group of PCVs (Moz 19ers) is excited about the little luxuries we’ll get to readopt. Or even adopt for the first time ever, well, just because we can. Fast internet. Netflix. Home-crafted brews. Beautifully maintained roads. So much running water we can marvel at the whoosh of a flushing toilet. Snowy Christmases. Going to the gym. Maybe even Taco Bell?? And generally, just being culturally literate and understood. Being normal. The list of things we’ve grown accustomed to living without is endless. Yet, we wonder. Will they “get me” back home?
The Public Radio series This American Life produced a piece called “Will They Know Me Back Home” that places in starker clarity, via the eyes of American soldiers who served in Iraq, what you could say is the traveler’s fear of reintegration – the fear of not fitting back into society after a life changing experience. “Will They Know Me Back Home” takes you through the stressors, awkward encounters, and reconciliations American soldiers from the 216th platoon faced upon their return from the Iraq war. From short trips to the mall that feel like fanfares to buying their first legal six-pack of beer, these young soldiers struggle to reconcile who they were before they left and who they’ve become. And while Peace Corps and military service host radically different missions abroad, at a second glance, in many aspects the types of sacrifices both face upon homecoming are quite similar. The fear of never truly belonging anywhere - being too American to fit in abroad, and too deeply, permanently changed to ever see home in the same way again, especially after having witnessed and experienced things previously unimaginable. The fear of being an outsider to the life you’re supposed to be readopting, struggling to find room and acceptance for your new ways of seeing the world. And also of course, with attempts to reinsert oneself into daily routines, the weighty realization that life and loved ones back home have gone on just fine without you. Homecoming, once fervently sought and a buoy for wavering morale , quickly transforms into a crisis of belonging. Of place. Of purpose. Of self.
Excerpted from David Finkle’s non-fiction narrative The Good Soldiers, one of the best moments of the This American Life episode was a returning soldiers’ monologue about his first few hours back on American soil. The soldier explains:
As I walked through the airport, I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. The businessmen on cellphones, the families on vacations – all of it was too strange. The “normal abnormal” Major Cummings called Iraq. But this was exactly the opposite. The “abnormal normal.” So, I kept my eyes down and made my connecting flight home to a girlfriend I wasn’t sure I even knew how to talk to anymore.
Peace Corps service in Mozambique involves few of the types of traumas and horrors experienced by our troops that were in Iraq. Yet given the adjustments I’ve made as a volunteer living more than two years abroad, Mozambique has indeed become my “normal abnormal” – every day in Mozambique pushes ones comfort zone and confronts you with all the things you’ve ever taken for granted. Things like being able to express yourself in your own language and the ease with which Americans generally forge trust and friendships, to having relatively similar cultural ideas about personal space, borrowing, and what’s “right” and “wrong.” Yet it is the abnormal that I’ve come to love. It’s the abnormal that makes me feel the most alive. I have never been more creative, resourceful, flexible, and open-minded than living with the everyday challenges of the normal abnormal. What happens when I swap it for the “abnormal normal” of the United States? I already know there will be no way around the shock of American reintegration. The strange part is to think that I’ll be leaving behind the most simple, but completely magical life I may ever have. As I stand now, I’m single, live on $200 a month, am well-educated, yet still idealistic enough to think the world is my oyster. Bring it on world.
Still, I’m already 24 and not too much of a romantic to realize that I’ll have very tangible responsibilities in a handful of years. I figure I have a year left to “play” before making some of my most serious life decisions. A year before I have to pay actual adult-like bills. A year before I take the first steps toward my career as a global health nurse and educator. The question I’ve been wrestling with recently is – how do I want to fill that time?
Let’s start by putting off that dreaded American reintegration process a little longer, and tacking on another 6 months of service. That’s right. Next year, with or without Peace Corps (we’re still negotiating terms), I will be extending my visa to stay in Mozambique through June 2015 in order to volunteer at the Vilanculos hospital and get critical hands-on experience to make sure that global nursing is something I’m really bent on doing. By July, I’m tentatively planning on traveling for six months (to climb Kilimanjaro too!) and then am looking at jumping on board a sailboat as a crew-member and sailing from Capetown to the Caribbean. If that doesn’t work out, then I’ll just fly home after traveling Africa.
Either way, the next chapter is in sight. I’m working toward
something meaningful. And, finally American reintegration is on my horizon
whether I like it or not. :)
