Wrapping it Up Here

Post by Lara

30 September 2014

Hello everyone! I know it's been a while. We're all wrapped up in wi-fi, college football, job interviews, and going out to dinner with everyone we didn't see for two years-- but as today is the last day of Peace Corps volunteers in Sierra Leone (at least for a while), it seems fitting to put a bit of a denouement onto our little blog.

First off, I wanted to make our last post "Our Peace Corps Service by the Numbers" in which I would list off (unemotionally) all of the things that we counted while we were in Salone, and then attach a (rather more emotional) sign-off paragraph or two, and thereby tie a nice little ribbon around the last 27 months of our lives.  BUT it never works out how we want it to, does it?  All my numbers are tucked away in a journal somewhere, and that journal was nowhere to be found today.  I'm afraid it may be a while (like a month...or several years) before I stumble across it again, probably in some place that I put it *knowing* I would remember, and at that point I may log back on here and post our real, final blog post.  In the meantime, a few words will have to do.

Now, on to the hot topic: Sierra Leone.  We left on August 1st, amid a slightly chaotic non-evacuation of all volunteers and trainees from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia in the face of a seemingly sudden realization that the current Ebola outbreak wasn't going to die down as quickly as everyone estimated back in March when the first cases started showing up.  We ourselves were not pulled out of the country-- we had already packed up our house, said our goodbyes, and gotten medically cleared in anticipation of our scheduled closing date.  However, the volunteers who came to Salone a year after us, and those who had just arrived this past June, were not so lucky as to have that kind of closure before leaving. Some had no notice at all, because they were already in the US on vacation during the summer holiday.  I can't imagine how difficult and confusing it must be to serve as a volunteer for a year, knowing that I had another year to work on projects and get the teaching thing down and wrap up all my loose ends, only to find myself home indefinitely with no real plans until further notice.  And to think of packing all my things up for 2+ years, selling my car, quitting my job, and just a short 8 weeks later landing back where I started would not be easy to deal with either.  I've joked before that becoming a Peace Corps volunteer brought with it an emotional instability that I wasn't familiar with-- and these are some good examples of what I mean by that.

Of course that's the story on this side of the ocean.  On the other side, school and standardized testing have been postponed until further notice, travel is severely curtailed, and weekly markets have been banned.  Additionally, Sierra Leone has implemented nationwide shut-downs several times now, once for 3 whole days, to try and allow medical workers to catch up with the rising number of sick people who are avoiding hospitals and to slow the spread of Ebola.  News stories that we've heard are alarming, to say the least.  We haven't had a whole lot of contact with our friends and neighbors back in Salone, but we have heard that so far only one documented case of Ebola has been found in our town of Mattru Jong in the south.  Our host mother wrote us not long ago during one of the shut-downs, and told us that her kids are simply bored, because they're not allowed to leave the house.  The Ebola outbreak is touching everyone, even in places not directly experiencing the disease.

As I am neither an epidemiological expert nor a witness on the ground at this point, I don't feel comfortable describing the Ebola situation in any more detail. All I know is that the nation-wide measures being taken are making it so that even those not at the epicenter of the disease are feeling its reverberations.  Peace Corps made the decision in September to close all of its volunteers out of service on October 1st and allow them to re-apply next year for a program of their choice, including (if things are looking more stable), West Africa.  Thus, today is every volunteer's last day.  We hope that the program will continue with a new group of volunteers next year-- but it's far too soon to tell now.

Ultimately, we feel a sense of completeness about our service that I'm afraid not all the volunteers who are leaving can relate to.  We did our two years, completed our projects, locked up our house, and said goodbye to our friends.  For now, Mattru is our former home and a chapter in our lives that is at least mostly closed.  We may not have accomplished everything we planned to, but all-in-all we are happy with our time in Salone and happy as well to be home in Ohio. We are moving forward.  Kevin's looking for engineering jobs, and I will be applying to nursing school in the next year.  We're not sure where we'll end up, but we're fairly certain it will be within driving distance of our families in Ohio.

I'm not sure yet how much writing I'm going to be doing in the future, but I went ahead and created a post-Peace Corps blog, where I'll be writing from now on. You can find me (and occasionally Kevin too!) at www.ninefourten.blogspot.com.  Thanks for reading our blog, and we hope to see you in our new space!