The end is near. Or it would be anyway had I not made the decision to extend my service and stay on the island for another 7 or 8 months. I’ll be continuing work in my community while taking on leadership roles within Peace Corps DR with our Camp Superman and Deportes para la Vida initiatives.
Even as I’m sticking around for a while, the end of October marks a milestone. A number of Volunteers from my group, those who arrived together to the sweltering summer heat of the DR in August 2009, will be heading back to America to begin their lives as ‘Returned’ Peace Corps Volunteers.
The imminent finish line becomes more apparent and more realistic with every passing week. In early September, the 38 who remain from my group attended a 3-day Close of Service Conference intended to give us all the tools necessary to readjust back into American life.
Then a few weeks later the most recent edition of the PCDR Publication ‘Gringo Grita’ came out and featured surveys filled out by the 38 of us entering our final month of service. It is essentially a yearbook full of our funniest and most cherished experiences of the past two years.
Now we’re in October and people are starting to leave the island. Volunteers are hopping into taxis headed for the airport and simply disappearing off the island. The support system and family of Volunteers we have shared the past two years of our lives with are moving on to different and more American things. It is a strange and nostalgia-filled time of service.
How 27 months can pass by so damn fast I will never know. When someone first applies to the Peace Corps, they can’t help but think 27 months seems like a long time. A sizeable time commitment. It’s not. Well, it is, but it’s not.
It feels like just yesterday we stepped off a plane in Santo Domingo and were thrown headfirst into an endless cycle of cultural and linguistic misunderstanding. To sweat, mosquitoes & colmados. To rice, beans & viveres. To Dengue Fever, Intestinal Parasites & Scabies. To meeting Dominicans who treated you like family and to meeting 50 strange Americans who in two years you would recognize as family.
It’s almost impossible to believe that so many of us are now in our 27th and final month of service. It's strange. It's sad. It's exciting. It's unfathomable. It's here. It's now. It's happening.
Where does time go?
