A Sun Came

Before leaving Togo, I sat down with the medical officer to go over some final paperwork, discuss the voucher system for getting my teeth cleaned, etc. I still had a few questions that went unanswered during my final medical exam a few months before. That exam was done by a Nicaraguan woman the Peace Corps kind of just hired as a temp while the PCMO was on vacation. She could do the technical stuff, but when it came time to talk about the depression and the insomnia, I got the feeling she wanted nothing less than to talk about something as scary as emotions.

So I asked the PCMO about the depression and the insomnia, even though then, two days before my departure, they were no longer problems. She said those are pretty standard pre-au revoir symptoms. Though, she said, if they recurred when I returned to the States, looking up members of a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer network could help, to have somebody to talk to, or at least to get contacts of other people who are good to talk to when you get back home and feel like a stranger in your own country.

No thanks, I told her. I didn’t exactly have the greatest time for the past two years. I think the last thing I’d want to do is talk to somebody who probably thinks Peace Corps service was the pinnacle of their young adulthood, if not their entire life up to date. I don’t regret doing the Peace Corps, but I sure as hell don’t want it to define me. It is something I did because of who I am. It is not who I am. That may seem like a thin line, but it’s a significant distinction.

I was speaking with a volunteer once who asked me if I could ever imagine marrying someone who had never been in the Peace Corps. The guy’s a great volunteer, and fairly intelligent, but that’s one of the dumbest questions I’ve ever heard. Just because someone didn’t serve in Togo or some other shitty place doesn’t mean they’re not interesting.

I told all this to the PCMO, about how I kind of worried about this indifference I have to the past two years of my life (when I say indifference, I mean to say that I’m glad I did it, even though I didn’t exactly enjoy it, but I’ll never do it again; and I don’t mean to imply that being in Africa had anything to do with it, so those of you inclined to racist inferences can just shut the fuck up; you know who you are) and the PCMO said that, well, maybe re-integration won’t be as much a problem for me as it is for others. The ones that have the hardest time, she said, are the ones that just can’t get over the fact that they were volunteers. Those poor bastards, I said. Yeah, she said, tell me about it.

- -

Halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, four hours into an eight hour flight, the captain puts the fasten seat belt sign back on and the flight attendant gets on the intercom to say, in three languages, that we’ll be hitting some bitchin’ turbulence, and that we are strongly advised to fasten our seatbelts and not walk around the goddamn cabin, s’il vous plaît. The woman in the seat next to me, a Moroccan who has been living in Boston for the past fifteen or twenty years, is terrified. She’s been nervous the entire flight, but now she’s just kind of silently flipping out beside me, and I do my best to calm her down. It’s all that strong ocean air, I tell her. We’re at the crossroads of the west-bound currents and the east-bound currents, it’s always really bumpy this far away from land. I don't know if this is true, but she stops shaking, at least, so I put my headphones back on and try to close my eyes, because now, thanks to her, I’m freaking out. Two years, I think, of riding in overloaded, poorly maintained bush taxis on shitty roads—including that time the brakes went out coming down the mountain from Kara—and this is what finally gets me. No, I tell myself. I deserve, if nothing else, to see my brother and sister. Whatever is in charge of the universe won’t cheat me of that.

Now, I have a firm belief that God, in whatever form he may take, does not listen to human prayers. I don’t believe in predestination, in fate or kismet, and I don’t believe that he will save anybody from death, no matter how good that person is. We are, as individuals, far too insignificant to have any pull with the big guy. But since I am a hypocrite, when faced with the fear that my life is in danger I raise my spiritual voice. Like that time I biked eighteen kilometers in the rain, with lightning striking along the roadside. Like right now on this airplane, with a Moroccan woman convulsing beside me.

We make it, though, alive, to JFK. I wait for about four hours at two different bars, drinking inordinately expensive beers. Finally it’s time for the plane home, and I get on, and now I’m the one shaking, but with excitement. Because after two years and three months; after bush taxis and failed projects and a feeling of complete social impotence; after bribes and poverty and that one time I got stopped by the police with JT; after a project I paid for and never saw; after all those sorcery deaths; after two terrifying flights to get off that continent; I will be home. We take off and level off and I spread out on the seat next to me and sleep away the last three hours of this long exile.

- -

The airport was clean and comfortably empty and just the right kind of cold. The terminal was a long tall-ceilinged hallway with large glass walls looking out on the empty boarding alleys folded up like accordions. The Indianapolis airport had been remodeled since I'd left. I didn't recognize anything unique, anything outside of the generic airportness of the place, to tell me that I was Home. A security guard was seated at a podium-type desk at the point of no return for arrivals, a tall black man with a clean navy blue sweater, and I had the desire to walk up to him like a little nine-year old and tell him, just to keep him up to date, that I'd been gone for two years and now was home. In the week that I've been home, I've been getting this urge a lot.

I was trying to take everything in, doing my best to not miss a single detail, which meant I missed it all, because suddenly, as the hallway I was in zeroed down to an arched opening leading to some kind of massive lounge, the woman standing next to the potted tree shouted, "Oh my God, it's him, I hardly noticed him!" Hello, Momma. Nick ran at me like a Welshman. Dad had his camera out and snapped photos. Something hugged me around the middle, and I looked down to find Anna, my adorably short sister. Waiting behind them in a polite line, with the kinds of smiles people wear when they don't want to appear too happy, but, of course, actually are, were four of my best friends, Justin, Mike, Andy, and Tim. I was ecstatic. But, strangely, I was remarkably calm. In every daydream about my homecoming, I imagined myself blinded with tears (of joy). I don't know if it was the fatigue of travel, or simply the great sigh of relief of being home, but instead of tears I just felt exhausted, immeasurably content, and, actually, a little hungry. So when Dad put down the camera and pulled a sack full of Arby's roast beef sandwiches out of his coat, everything was fine.