Homecoming

I went on a jog this morning and about half way I took a short break at a place on the edge of town where a few watering holes had been. During the rainy season these holes filled up with water and animals used it to drink and people used it to wash their animals. Since the end of rainy season, around mid-October, it has not rained one drop on the Department of Kaolack where I live. So these watering holes that used to have at least a couple feet of water and flowering water plants, are now bone dry complete with cracked mud and a dog carcass at the bottom. Yeah, so I’ve been here a long time.

To be exact, I’ve been in Africa for 1 year, 7 months and 6 days. But I am coming home in less than three weeks. I’ll be home for about 2.5 weeks and I am really looking forward to seeing family and friends, eating delicious food, enjoying some relatively cool weather and seeing what I’ve missed. Home is something that every PCV thinks and wonders about daily from the day we step off the plane, and I am no different but lately this pondering has become a mild anxiety. Don’t get me wrong, I am still extremely excited about it and when I imagine what it’ll be like, everything is fine but I just don’t know if my memory of home is enough to prepare me for actually being home. Hearing stories from volunteers who have already made the trip about reverse culture shock, I wonder if it’ll be similar for me. After all, I am in a city, I have running water and electricity, my cute little room is quite comfortable (even for my parents), I even see other Americans at least weekly. Will I be stunned by the pace? by people speaking English all around me? by all the options? by the materialism? I guess I’ll find out soon enough. What I am pretty certain of though is that my formerly thick Wisconsin blood has now thinned beyond all recognition and I’ll be wearing a sweater when it’s 75 degrees, and that my GI system will go through reverse culture shock with all the cheesy goodness I’ll be eating, hey, maybe it’ll even be enough to get rid of the amoebas.

The African Sky

I had seen movies and Paul Simon sang that great song but I have to say I wasn’t entirely prepared for the African skies. Especially in my part of the country, where it’s as flat as it gets and the tallest building in the regional capital is 4 stories high, the expanse of the almost-always cloudless, blue sky is remarkable. The cloudlessness makes for the days to be oppressively hot, with the only escape from direct sunlight being the shade of a tree or building, but it makes the nights absolutely breathtaking. When I visit friends in the village, and the moon doesn’t get in the way, the expanse of the Milky Way stretches out above us. Sometimes, if there’s a power-outage, I’m lucky enough to get a taste of it where I live too. My host family doesn’t quite understand my curiosity with the night’s sky, but they usually humor me.

The other night, my calendar said there was supposed to my meteor showers so my sister, Maguette and I pulled a mat out into the road in front of the house to lay there and watch for shooting stars. Well, we didn’t see any, but we had a great conversation, one of those that I hope to remember many years from now. First she told me that for her birthday (which is coming up), what she wants more than anything is a cell phone. But then she started asking me about the Earth, the moon, the stars. We lay there for a couple hours, me trying to explain space and astronomy with my usual mix of Wolof and French and her talking about heaven and God as she knew them. Like I said, there is just something special about the African sky.