Leaving

I’ve been putting off writing this. Maybe because it makes me sad. Maybe because I didn’t have all the details right away. Probably a mix of the two.

Long story short, I left Baní.

Last Monday the guy who robbed me got sentenced to jail time. It turns out his family is into some pretty bad stuff, and the Peace Corps decided not to take any chances with my safety. So I left my site on Wednesday and went to the capital. They put me up in a hotel and I’ve been living out of my backpack for the past week.

On Sunday I moved everything out of my house. My boss and our security coordinator came, as did a Peace Corps driver in a big truck. I had gone earlier in the day to spend some time with my host family and pack things up. Everyone helped me put things in boxes and wrap up fragile stuff, all the while with a gloomy feeling hovering over our heads.

When it came time to leave, we didn’t say goodbye, preferring the less-final “hasta luego.” See you later. And it’s true — I will be able to see my host family again soon. But it’s going to be a hard adjustment not to live there anymore.

So what am I doing now? Well, Peace Corps does not want to put me in another site because my group is technically done in May. They don’t want to develop somewhere just to have a volunteer in it for four months. So I am going to be traveling around between now and May. I’ll visit other volunteers, helping them out with their projects if they want me to, and getting to know parts of the country I haven’t seen.

I much rather would have finished out my 2 years in the site I started in, but I really have no choice here. So, it’s time to make lemonade out of lemons.