Saying Goodbye (cont.)
The next morning, I awoke early after a few hours of sleep. Mahon was quiet. I had never once been awake before the villagers (or the roosters), but this time, all was silent as I put the last of my things together and I looked around my little house. Soon, a small crowd had formed outside, and 35 people escorted me to wait for the bus. When the bus pulled up, I was surprised by my own emotions. During their two years of service, there are certainly many moments when Volunteers fantasize about going home, about finishing service and saying, “I am done!” But now that that moment was finally here, it was a hard reality to know that I may never see these people again.
The Burkinabe have an interesting custom for goodbyes. When you leave to go on a long journey, you must shake hands with the left hand. This is quite significant because normally doing anything with your left hand is culturally inappropriate and is actually quite rude. But the custom holds that now you must shake hands with your left because it indicates that you have to return at some point to rectify this wrong. As the bus pulled up, my friend Clarisse held out her left hand for me to shake. I felt as if I had been stabbed as it finally sunk in that this was really goodbye. This gesture was repeated over and over during a cacophony of even more benedictions, more “Aminas,” more pleas not to forget the people of the village, and mostly, my own repeating of A ni ce kossbe…a ni ce…a ni ce.” (Thank you for everything…thank you.) The bus driver finally honked that it was time for me to board. By the time I had said my last goodbyes and managed to load my things—chickens and all—on the bus, I was quite a sight. Despite the fact that I had worked hard during my two years to understand and adapt to local customs, this morning I couldn't help but break some of the rules. People in Burkina Faso do not cry in public. Yet, here I was, walking onto a bus crowded with startled, staring African passengers, crying like a baby.
Now that my Volunteer service has ended, people ask me if I think I have changed because of this experience. I may still be too close to the experience to tell. But there are little things I've noticed: I've gained a good deal more patience, I've lost a certain sense of vanity, and I've discovered the joys of eating with my hands and bathing under the stars. In general, however, I think I've learned less about me and more about the human condition. Burkina Faso is a terribly impoverished country and the sub-standards of living, particularly en brousse (in the bush), are something we as Americans could never fully understand. This is a country with more than 50 ethnic groups and languages, let alone a belief in magic and ritual that doesn't easily fit into our Western logic. But what I have learned is that, despite all of this, the Burkinabe are not so different from us. Babies get born, children grow up, marriages take place, people die. People fight, love each other, develop friendships, have enemies. Some people work hard, some people don't. And at night, people go to bed only to get up the next morning to do it all again. We go through this life with its good days and its bad days and, ultimately, it is our relationships with others that make all the difference. The beauty of the Peace Corps, of this experience, is realizing that I have much more in common with a group of African villagers than I ever thought possible. John F. Kennedy, in creating the Peace Corps, said that one of its goals would be to foster a cultural understanding between peoples all over the world. To me, that goal, beyond any work I did in Burkina Faso, is the one I am most proud to have achieved.
