Home:Coming!

We are leaving Cameroon July 19th.

It was a rather long and arduous process to get that date settled over the late spring.  Much more difficult than it should have been.  And while it’s a few weeks later than what we would have preferred, we’ve made the best of it.

Our journey home will take us though a week in Spain with good friends we’ve made here, a few days in France visiting an old friend, and then for two weeks in Dublin with Kiyomi’s mom and her partner (plans made in April a year ago and looked forward to ever since!).

Finally, we’ll be back in the States on August 15th, and it’s about time!  Two years without ever visiting home may not sound like such a long time, but two years of being foreign, alien, permanently outside and other, is at the very least exhausting.  And while it’s been good and bad and hard and fun and worth it and so not worth it, we have the feeling it may take a little time to put better words to all of this.

Our last week in town will be a bit more busy than we expected.  We’d been told to close our house and had made some plans to try to sell some of our larger furniture to other volunteers a month ago, when Peace Corps offered us a huge relief by deciding to keep our house.  Then with less than two weeks left in town, and it being largely impossible to make arrangements to sell anything at this point, Peace Corps told us last week that they’d changed their minds again and won’t be keeping our house.  But they are keeping another house and will take our furnishings for that one, though we suspect Peace Corps moving our house will really involve a lot of us hauling furniture and boxes (thanks to the packages we’ve received over the years, we have boxes to pack things up in! And our Air Force upbringing makes us old pros at moving house).  It wouldn’t be quite so bad if we weren’t also trying to do all the other things involved with leaving a place – saying goodbye to friends, visiting favorite places a last time, last minute souvenir shopping, writing our final Volunteer Reports and Descriptions of Service, making purchases for our travel, closing our bank accounts, getting signatures to say everything is properly in order, rechecking and editing our resumes, putting out feelers for new jobs, an apartment, and on.

But, as this is written on July 5th, in 9 days and counting, come what may this will all be done, and we’ll be going through our final medical evaluations in Yaounde to leave here at the end of that week.