Goodbye, Tambacounda

Yesterday I made the 10-hour Tamba-to-Dakar trip for the very last time (not counting possible trips back to visit someday). Everyone keeps asking me how it feels to have left my village, to know that I may never again see people who have been my family and friends for the past two years. The truth is, I don't know. I think I should be feeling really sad about saying goodbye to them all and to the incredible life I have been living for the last two years. Probably I will feel that eventually, maybe on the plane home, maybe later. But right now mostly I just feel relieved to have gotten the stressful goodbyes over and to finally be released from the never-ending village guilt.

And I wish I could say that my village goodbyes had gone well, that they were heartwarming and had left me with a warm fuzzy feeling. I wish that they had been. Instead, when I told my villagers it was my last week, all I got was people coming to my hut or pulling me aside to tell me, "When you leave, I want you to give me x. Okay?  Don't forget!  I've got dibs!"  The closest I got to anything like an "I'll miss you" was my host mother saying "What am I going to do when you're gone? We're not getting another volunteer after you, so who's going to give me money for going to the doctor and buying spices?"

After a couple days of that, I just couldn't take it anymore.  All I'd wanted was to have some quality time in my village, doing normal village things with my friends and family.  But except for the kids, who were adorable as always, I couldn't enjoy anyone's company because all they wanted to talk about was what presents I would give them.  So I decided it was time to leave, before the goodbyes could turn me bitter about my whole Peace Corps experience.  So I told my village I had to change plans and leave in the morning, instead of two days later as I had originally planned.  And then I finally got the nice goodbyes.  I invited my sisters over to my hut after dinner, planning to tell them that they could divide up all the stuff in my hut among themselves.  So they came over, but instead of immediately looking over my stuff and arguing over who got what as I had expected them to do, they just sat on my bed and wanted to talk.  So I ended up having a really nice last evening with my sisters, which made up a lot for the last couple of days.  And then in the morning I got up and biked out of the village before anyone was up (as I had told them I was planning to do) so there wouldn't be any chance for my nice goodbye to be ruined by more "gimme gimme".

So I guess the way my service ended was pretty typical of my whole experience in Senegal: lots of stress and frustration, with some really nice moments thrown in to make it all worth it.