something i wrote a couple days ago....
How many times in your life do you leave a place you love behind? I don’t mean places like a beautiful beach you visited on vacation or an overlook that you passed on a trip somewhere that you took out your camera and took lots of pictures of. I don’t even mean a city that you fell in love with on a trip, an exotic place unlike any you’d visited before and became one of your favorite places. I’m talking about the places that have hurt you, where you’ve fallen and almost couldn’t get up, but when you did you came to like yourself and the place that much more for challenging you; or a place where you have memories of joy and sadness, where you’ve cried your eyes out and also laughed with abandon until you almost cried as well. These are places where one might have relationships with street corners or trees or maybe a library carrel. Maybe it’s a home where you lived growing up, a school or university where you attended or a neighborhood block where you bought your first home or where your first boyfriend lived.
I left one of my places two weeks ago. My town in Mali has become a place I love but from now on only a place I will visit. I’ll admit, I cried pulling away as I looked down on my family and town through the wide stained glass of the dirty fogged bus window, fuzzing my last image of my village.
I’ve been in Bamako several weeks now, and other volunteers and friends have asked if I will go back before I leave Mali the first week in September. There’s no way I could I reply. To cut the ties again like that and feel another empty hole near my stomach, that I try to hold in by wrapping my arms around my middle?
I’ve called a couple times and they’re happy to hear from me. Have they already moved on? Yes. Absolutely. It would be naïve to think that people who have been moving and watching people leave their whole lives wouldn’t be able to adjust to my absence, I who had only ever promised that I would be there two years. They knew all along I would leave them, just as every other white person has. And I wonder if they doubt my commitment to stay in touch, for which I wouldn’t blame them either.
I can already hear myself starting to lose the language so I seek out other people who speak it. Friends probably think I’m showing off but really what I want is for someone to appreciate and jabber away with me. Just like a toddler makes noises to hear himself speak:
No matter where I am here, I don’t want this part of me to leave; The brain that has to translate and gets frustrated sometimes when it cant make the sentence it wants perfect, the humor I can instantly invoke or the conversation I can strike up with anyone and their appreciation for my effort to speak their language, even if I use the wrong words and phrases, the kamikaze smile- here we go who knows what will happen attitude, the irony of the most simple situations and the smiles it brings out in me, my patience and the people who refuse to be discouraged so they bring it out in me, the random friends I make each day women, men taxi drivers, and the small high it gives me and even the frustration I tackle each day, absorb, acknowledge and let simmer and sometimes even boil over if the jerk on the corner deserves it for being really impolite, even though he probably meant well in the end. I enjoy the challenge because the happiness is so accessible if you’re just willing to play along.
I thank my village and this country for all they’ve given me; Not for the 15 keychains or the interesting neon thread wall hangings (I cant really even describe) or even the jewelry, cultural experiences, friendships although I appreciate them all. It’s the challenges they forced upon me, the questions they made me ask and the lifestyle I’ll hopefully now be able to live, wherever I am.
pictures and videos from my last months at site. leaving our gao house, leaving site and the family
Our youth center and library!
getting my hair braided and xadijatu's new bear strapped to her back
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