Today marks the official end of my Peace Corps service, but not quite the end of Peace Through Chemistry. I still have to make, after all, the journey home.
As I sit at the beach bar by the Peace Corps house in Conakry, sipping a Guiluxe beer, I can't help but think: damn, life in a small West African village is hard. Glad I did that, but also glad not to be doing it anymore.
There is a quote from Little Miss Sunshine, in which Steve Carell (Frank) expresses a lot of what I feel not just about leaving site here in Guinea, but also about my Peace Corps experience on the whole:
Frank: Do you know who Marcel Proust is?
Dwayne: He's the guy you teach.
Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads... Anyway, he, uh, he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, Those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? You know, total waste. Didn't learn a thing.
It feels good to rationalize hard times as character-building and learning experiences. But what did I actually learn? Don't ask me that yet. It may be a very long time before I am able to define and articulate exactly what non-tangibles I took away personally from my Peace Corps service.
I can't wait to get to Abidjan, where I plan on doing precisely nothing except whatever I want. It's gonna be fun. Ciao for now.
Stats from my service
24: number of months spent in the peace corps (july '09 - july '11)
--> 10: approximate number of those months spent either in training, on evacuation, on consolidation, on administrative leave, or on "interrupted service"
2: number of countries served
3: number of times installed at a site
2: number of academic school years that have gone by
2: number of semesters I have spent teaching
300: approximate number of west african students who might have learned some chemistry from me over the past two years... and who won't soon forget their crazy American teacher
8: number of west african countries visited (guinea, mali, burkina, senegal, togo, cote d'ivoire, ghana, and guinea-bissau... kind of)
--> 28: number of pages in my passport
--> 1: number of those pages that are blank, i.e. don't have some sort of entry/exit stamp or visa
0: number of serious illnesses contracted or injuries suffered
39: number of days until my plane lands in new york city
52: number of days before my phd/chemistry program starts at columbia
0: number of people with a peace corps experience like mine
0: number of regrets