Each year, the Ambassador hosts the outgoing group of Peace Corps Volunteers and treats them to a real American Thanksgiving meal. Two volunteers are elected to represent the group, and share a short speech about their service. For some reason, my peers elected me to speak.
After practicing a number of times, and crying for about three days straight, I told our Country Director that I didn't think I could make it through the speech without completely losing it. I'm extremely emotional about everything that has happened the past two years, and even more so about leaving a place and an experience I've come to love so dearly.
When he basically told me to suck it up, I started crying again. I think this shocked him, and I think he felt bad because he was really just trying to make a joke. So, he told me that if I cried during my speech, he would come and stand beside me. I didn't believe him.
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Bawling about how much I love it here - and being
comforted by our Country Director |
Needless to say, I started crying the second I walked up to the front of the room. I was embarrassed by how unprofessional I was acting, especially in front of the Ambassador, State Department officials, my entire PCV group, and several Returned PCVs, but I couldn't control how overwhelmed and gratified I felt about what has transpired over the past two years.
But like he promised, the Country Director, a former Thailand PCV himself, came and stood beside me, and it helped. He showed the same kindness that my village shows to me everyday: that although I am pretty much a walking spectacle and I can't do anything without causing a scene, I'm loved and supported regardless of this flaw.
I made it through my speech. But the flood gates had opened and I couldn't stop crying for another 30 minutes. So I sat at a table and cried through the next speech, and the closing remarks, and then I cried in the bathroom, back at the table, and through a couple of photo ops. Everything about the last two years hit me all at once and because I couldn't express it in words, it poured out of my eyes until there really was nothing left.
My service has meant a lot to me. More than I ever thought it would. And I owe 100% of that to the people I serve and serve with. My Thai mom has a habit of telling me how "choke dii" (lucky) I am to be serving here in this community when I tell her about another volunteer's problems, or talk about PCV experiences in other countries. Sometimes this is annoying. But most of the time I can look her straight in the eye and say "Hen duay" which literally translates to "I see also" but means "I agree with you."
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With the Ambassador, Ginny (a fellow PCV speaker), and Kevin, our CD
and me still red-faced from my emotions. |
I'm still a little embarrassed about my public display of emotions - especially since it's frowned upon in Thai culture - a lesson I've learned many times over while living here.
But ultimately, I think it's okay to be emotionally overwhelmed by an experience as special, as moving, and as life-changing as serving as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer can be. I am beyond lucky, and it's literally enough to bring me to tears.
So without further ado, my take home messages from my two years living abroad as a Peace Corps Volunteer, but I have a feeling most of you have heard them all before:
1) Love knows no cultural boundaries or language barriers.
2) Happiness is a choice; if you want to be, you can learn to be happy anywhere.
3) Life is all about the little things: a piece of good chocolate, a bike ride, an old Thai lady just smiling and saying hello.
and 4) Learn to laugh at yourself. It makes life a heck of a lot easier and a heck of a lot more fun.
And if you're interested, my speech:
About a month ago, I cleaned out my office desk. It was
the first time in almost a year that I sat at my desk for longer than 10
minutes. I’ve been busy integrating, you
see. Along with lesson plans, Thai
language flash cards, and paperclips, I found the site information packet Peace
Corps gave to each of us on the day when we found out where we would be living
for the next two years.
Now, I don’t know what everyone else did with their packet
on that warm February day, but I read mine over and over and over for weeks,
pouring over every detail of information.
I used it during the first few weeks at site to try to remember people’s
names, “find projects,” and generally (and desperately) orient myself. If
you would have asked me about it two months ago, I probably would have told you
that I read it so much, I memorized it.
But looking over it just a few weeks ago, I can now
confidently tell you that I didn’t memorize it.
That for as many times as I read it, and how simply it was laid out in
front of me, I had no clue what that document contained. But today I do. Almost two years later, the names listed on
the front: my Nayoke, Balat, Community Development officer, are no longer just
names. They are faces I can easily pick
out of a crowd, smiles, memories, friends… They are my family.
I realized how far I – we – have all come since we arrived
in January 2012. I also realized that it
took Peace Corps about 4 and a half hours to find out everything that it took
me almost two years to uncover. But
isn’t that the way it is sometimes? It’s
hard to see the forest for the trees. I
could have let that upset me, but after I thought about it, I figured that this
is exactly what Peace Corps is all about: learning to see the trees despite the
forest, or rather seeing with your heart instead of just your eyes.
Like everyone’s, my packet was a wealth of knowledge – the
big picture. And even though it was all
right in front of me from the beginning, I couldn’t see it until I started
living it.
If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to go back and look at
your packets, and see now how intertwined, integrated, and meaningful those
words are now. I encourage all of us to
look back at those words, read them again and think about what you see now -
Now that you are looking at them with your heart- with more than just your
eyes. And how now, a year and half
later, we’ve all come to know, hopefully love, and see this country, this culture,
and our villages in such a way that can never be fully expressed on paper.
