The Last Word

All good things come to an end, and so too with my time in Namibia. It ended, for those of you who don’t know, with more of a whimper than a bang. For several months in the beginning of 2008, I worked at the library in Outapi doing a job that wasn’t particularly necessary. Every day I saw my former students walking to Canisianum, and I missed them. I wanted to find a way to stay for another full year, perhaps teaching again. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Education couldn’t find a spot for me. So, with many regrets, I decided on April 10 to come home. Just a few days later, I accepted a scholarship at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, for a one-year degree in Public Administration. Just a couple of days later, my mother fell ill and went to the hospital with a serious lung infection. I was in the capital city when this happened, and luckily had my passport with me, so I boarded a plane and headed straight home. Fortunately my mother has recovered, as much a testament to medical science as to stubbornness and strength of will.

Because of the process I described above, I didn’t really have a chance in Namibia to say my goodbyes, both to the people that I worked and lived with for 16 months but also to the experience itself. What did those 16 months in Namibia mean to me? What lessons did I learn? That’s what I’ll be trying to answer in this final culminating blog entry. This entry will be unlike previous entries, which hopefully were tasty morsels of life in Namibia liberally seasoned with policy and history and anthropology. This one will be navel-gazing, the sort of self-obsessive speculations that I tend to find dreadfully boring to read! So, please continue at your own risk!

Why did I go? For one, it was a life-long dream. In high school I learned about the Peace Corps from my friend Carrie, whose parents had met in Ethiopia in the 1960s. That summer, stoked to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, I refused to use my air conditioner because I was “in training.” However, during college I encountered a few roadblocks and some dreams faded to be replaced with new ones. With my theatre major in hand, I went first to England and then to New York, in search of greater perspectives and a life as an actor.

The dream began to resurface after I had become a teacher. Inchoately dissatisfied with teaching in New York, the pull of the developing world began to reassert itself. I looked at Peace Corps again and also at graduate programs in public policy, where graduates tended to work with exciting institutions like the World Bank, the U.N. Development Program, and the International Red Cross. Several grad school advisers recommended that I get the international experience before enrolling in a program; it made sense to see if I liked working abroad before committing to such a course of study. With no small trepidation about leaving behind family and friends, off I went to Namibia to see what the developing world was all about, and what my place in it might be.

The short answer, about what my place in it might be, is that I love working in the developing world. I love being immersed in a different culture, in trying to figure out what’s going on, in challenging myself to learn a new language. For all the frustrations and hassles or working in a developing country, it is immensely rewarding. The volunteer community became a place where I felt at home, reveling in the shared sense of purpose and an appreciation of other cultures and simpler ways of living. But I also felt very detached from my friends and my family back home.

So what lessons did I learn in going abroad? Some might be transitory lessons, and others may stay with me. Yet other lessons may remain vague for now, only to be realized at a later time. Nonetheless, this is what I think I’ve learned so far.

First, I learned to love a simpler way of life. In Namibia, there wasn’t much going on. There weren’t a lot of people. A good Friday night consisted of making dinner with a friend and then hanging out at his or her house. A good Sunday started on Saturday night, when I would put my clothes in my wash bucket to soak overnight. Then on a slow, luxurious Sunday morning, when the students were in church and I had the hostel to myself, I would hang my laundry in peace and quiet, write or read, go for a run, and then do a little work for school. By not trying to do too many things, the few things that I did became much, much more enjoyable.

This lesson might be transitory. Life moves much more quickly in America. Last night I met up with some new friends from my program – including two returned Peace Corps volunteers. We had dinner, dessert, and then a movie in just a few hours. That would have been a full weekend’s worth of excitement last year. When we did an activity on resource scarcity this week in class, one group of students pointed out that our scarcest resource right now is time. Last year in Namibia, there were many scarce resources, like telephone credit or cheese, but time was in abundance. I’d like to keep this sense of simplicity, but am not sure how to do so in America. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

Along these lines, I came to appreciate living outside a city. This lesson is, I fear, the most transitory. Right now I would love to live away from a big city, on a farm somewhere near enough to a job that I don’t have to commute for ages. It’s possible, especially if I stay in education, to get a decent job in a rural area. But my friends and family are all concentrated in the U.S.’s first and second cities, New York and Chicago. My good friends sent me a birthday card last year which said that anyone who moves far from their friends is, well, just plain stupid! In many ways they were right, and yet I can’t see living in a big city anymore. What’s the advantage? I think acting on this lesson will be one of the hardest for me to do.

Another thing I learned was that I can indeed enjoy teaching. In Namibia, I taught at a good school with smart, motivated students and a dedicated and ethical administrator. It made all the difference from my time teaching in New York City. It made the work fun, and yet, I’m still reluctant to commit fully to a life working at educating our nation’s youth. The big advantage of it, as I can see, is flexibility. I could work in big communities or small ones. I could work all over the country, and could easily go abroad again. But do I want to educate 16 year-olds for the rest of my life? When I decided to return from Namibia, I certainly had the option to go back into the classroom, and even though I had a very positive classroom experience last year, I didn’t do it. If I’m not a teacher at a high school, what else will I do?

Finally, and probably most up in the air for me now, is trying to figure out what role international work will have in my life. On the one hand, I really love being abroad. It’s hard, sweaty, difficult, and nowhere else do I feel as alive. On the other hand, I don’t want to be that far from my family for that long right now. Once I’ve started a family, if I can convince them to come with me, it would be a different story. So what can I do that builds on my interests in policy and education, international work and development, but allow me to live near my family in Chicago? That’s the question for this year.

Certainly, living abroad I learnt many lessons: simplicity, appreciation of a rural life, knowledge that I need to balance my need for exploring other cultures and worlds with my need for family and friends, and some further appreciation of teaching as a career. The question becomes now how I’ll apply these lessons. Can I find a place to live in the country that’s still close enough to my family? Can I find a way to balance the thrill of living in other countries with staying connected to my family? As so often happens, these questions come down to the concept of balance – how does one organize his or her life to keep things in balance?

So, after 16 months and 45,000+ words, it’s time for me to wrap up this blog, this journey we took together. Thank you so much for taking the time to read and to give me your comments, your emails, your critiques and praises. I hope that I’ve been able to crack open a window onto another world for you, a world that I loved inhabiting. Many people have asked me if I’ll continue to blog now that I’m back in the United States. I wasn’t planning on it, especially because I’ll be in grad school this year. Most entries would go something like this, “Woke up. Studied budgeting and/or statistics and/or economics. Went to class. Did group work. Studied more. Ate. Slept.” That probably wouldn’t be a very interesting blog. But thanks for your attention over the past year and a half, and I hope to have the chance to explore another world for you sometime in the future.

Peace out.