Tomorrow I leave the island...
I’ve never had this feeling when leaving a place, especially a place that I have come to call home. I don’t have adequate words to describe it. Sure, I was sad when I left my family in the United States to come to the Peace Corps, but I always knew it was only two years. No, I didn’t want to say goodbye to my best friends who were going forth into the world in inconveniently disparate locations, but it wasn’t the same emotion as I’m feeling now, as I prepare to make the trip back in the opposite direction. Even if I do come back, it will never be the same, I won’t be able to spend days on doñas porches, lazy Sundays doing laundry and cooking with Luisa, Mondays on the beach, Saturdays watching Don Francisco with Mama Julia, hot afternoons in plastic chairs catching a breeze, evenings dancing with neighbors in the street. I won’t ever live here again. I say it over and over and it still seems like a distant thought, something I still have to prepare to accept, but it's happening now. Part of this finality seems like attending yet another funeral, as if my life were a person about to be boxed up and stuck in the ground, taken away for good. And yet, unlike a funeral, I got the opportunity to say what I wanted to those I will miss, I got to give them their last hug and parting words.
“Closure” is the word Peace Corps throws around at conferences, workshops and casual conversations. “How’s the closure going? Make sure you get closure, it will help you readjust to life back in the United States.” Yeah, I guess that’s the word for part of this feeling, but equating it with something neat and tidy like closing a chapter of a book doesn’t come close to what I feel. One emotion I feel is profound astonishment, the same feeling I get when I watch a Manzanillo sunset from the top of my host mom Wendy’s roof looking out over the place I where I have had extremely challenging times and gotten through them...looking out over the place I’ve made a home and life for myself in...where I've loved people so much it hurts...trying to soak in the complexity of the feeling of awe bubbling up when I look over town.
And on that same roof, looking out, I also have a feeling of completeness, it was the same vantage point I experienced at the beginning and thought to myself “There is no fucking way I am going to be able to do this.” It always seems impossible until it’s done. The overwhelming sensation of “done” keeps hitting me over and over. I wish I could bottle up all the sunsets I have left and be able to open up each bottle of sunset and drink it when I need this feeling of deep satisfaction. I’m on this other end of this crazy ride, I did it! I try to make the contentedness last. But then there was an exhausting week of inevitable goodbyes, tears, parting words, celebrations, dinners, hugs and explanations. I had to keep reminding myself to just power through, hold on to it while I could, “drink it all up, Bea, it’ll be over all too soon.”
And then I left. And now I have to remember that the sun will continue to rise and set here without me. My students will graduate from high school and if they’re lucky, they’ll move to the city and get a degree. My women will continue their lives, adding grandchildren by the handful. Some will probably die before I have the chance to come back. Life continues even if I'm not ready for it.
But I feel whole.
I have labored over the past two years to bring change to a small community in the Dominican Republic, but that was only on the surface. I have struggled with problems I never knew existed much less how to solve. I have had my beliefs and moral compass turned around so many times it was often hard to see which way was up. I’ve been pushed to see right as wrong and wrong as right and now believe there isn’t an absolute definition of either. I understand another culture in the deepest of ways. I have learned to be more extroverted, outgoing and open. I’ve become a better person, a stronger individual, a more worthwhile citizen of the world. I’ve had so much shared with me from people who had no reason to love me at first. When I leave on Thursday, not all of me will come with; a part of my heart will forever stay in the Dominican Republic with people who ended up changing me.
Thank you sincerely for following along on my journey through the Dominican Republic. Stay tuned for the upcoming dispatches from Panama and as always, I send my love!
Xoxox, Bea
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| My women's group in Copey presented me with a framed plaque to thank me for two years of hard work and spoke beautiful words complete with a personalized prayer. |
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| My final goodbye lunch with my Copey family. On the menu: Goat(!!), potato salad, rice and beans with beer for dessert |
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| Goodbye dinner with some of my paramedics. On the menu: Pasta and potatoes with white sauce and oatmeal cookies for dessert...mmmm |
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| My host mom and dad in Manzanillo celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary with a blowout wedding. Wedding night! On the menu: pork, potato salad, eggplant, potato lasagna, cake |
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| Then it was my last night and we started to prepare a stew (me and momma Luisa) |
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| y goodbye from the neighborhood. On the menu: Chicken stew with avocado cooked a la improved cookstove |
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| Goobye from my original host family from the capital I went back to visit. On the menu: Bollos or tamale like things |
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| Me saying goodbye to baby Eudis. On the menu: baby drool |
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