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Part Five: Twasula, Twasoma, Twalamusa
Week One-Hundred and Four/ May 2018
760 Days Ago
Spring
760 days ago, we boarded a plane for Staging in Philadelphia, and I wrote:
“The black pleather airport seats are uncomfortable. I look to my left and maybe 20 feet away a pale woman sits slouched and yawns repeatedly, is she tired or trying to fill the silence? The terminal is nearly full, and no one is speaking. My husband is sitting next to me looking at the one small Uganda guide book we bought. The button on my purse says, “Peace Corps, Redefine Your Future” Well this is definitely redefinition…
Eventually we board the small plane bound for Philadelphia. We first met with a recruiter and began our Peace Corps application in June of 2015, now, a year later, we’re finally leaving. Step one: Get to Philly, step two: complete staging, step three: get on a bus at 2am for New York, step four: catch and 11am, 15-hour flight to South Africa, step five: occupy ourselves for six hours, step six: get on another four-hour flight to Uganda, step seven: get on another bus to our staging site.
As the plane ascends over the Midwest, the farms look like they’re stitched together like a patchwork quilt. As we fly over Appalachia the small mountains look like green waves. Eventually, the Philly skyline comes into view and we land. Step one complete.”
…
A lot can change in two years. Uganda, for my husband and myself, went from the name of a country we had to look up on a map to home. Living in Uganda went from being strange and new to just being life, normal, and not less than life in the states, as so many Americans have tried to argue whenever I mention that we lived in Uganda. I’ve found that for many Americans, they cannot disconnect U.S. consumerism from their conceptions of what it means to live a high-quality life.
In returning to the US, there is distance between how I think I am supposed to feel and how I actually feel. I think I am supposed to feel elated to be back in Wisconsin, as if living in Uganda were some extended vacation. And while I am happy to be back in Wisconsin, I desperately miss Uganda, because Uganda was home. In some ways, how I actually feel is as though I’m going through the stages of grief. There is the denial (I’m not really back in Wisconsin, this is just some extended holiday before we go back to Uganda), the anger (I felt grounded and loved my job in the Peace Corps, I loved our home and I loved our routine, and while I am so grateful for the support we’ve had from family for the last six months I still feel very up-in-the-air), the bargaining (what should we have done differently, how can we get back to Uganda), the depression, and slowly, the acceptance. And, all of this, how I’m feeling, is okay, and I think many Returned Volunteers, and others who have lived abroad for extended periods of time can relate. I’m also sure I felt the exact same way after I returned from living in China, maybe even more so because I had never experienced grief for a place before living in China, because up until that point I’d spent my entire life living in southern Wisconsin.
Returning home is harder than leaving, yet the entire process is important. I don’t think I feel completely “returned”, I feel somewhere in between Uganda and the U.S., although moving ever closer to being “returned”, and by that I mean feeling like I am permanently in the U.S., not about to return to Uganda.
Twasula Wano mu Uganda 