The resulting race to be ready by the time our flight left was a whirlwind.  I rushed to say goodbye, see people I needed to see, close my bank account (and the hostel account), give away things from my house, see someone from my village, and pack my two bags.  Evidence of the muddled hurry is given by the things that I decided to pack.  A sealed package of Earl Grey tea.  Another package of tea.  Random other things.  I slept 5 hours in three days, like many volunteers not sleeping at all on the night before we left.

We left with a security detail early in the morning, and were stunned by the green beauty of Moroccan fields.  In our sleep-deprived minds everything was new and vibrant.  We arrived at a very nice hotel and promptly had to sit through a ‘cross-culture’ session on Morocco, which, while normally interesting, seemed only barely relevant to us at the time.

Then we started a transfer conference, in which 97 volunteers struggled to figure out what they would like to do in the midst of being ripped from their old life.

The week has involved tears from almost everyone.  We wander through the halls desperately trying to finish what needs to be finished, to claw out some tiny island of stability into the sudden emptiness of our lives, but lost and fragile, at times staring into the distance or laughing all too loudly.  So little is in our control.

In the end I was offered two possible posts, one to Rwanda and one back to Guinea.  In both cases the time commitment desired is more than I feel I can give, so I have decided to COS and head home.

It is a decision fraught with fear of the irrevocable nature of leaving Peace Corps.  It is a decision full of the sudden tearing away of my life in Niger.  It is a decision with a vast wasteland of future plans.  This can be liberating, but also sad.

I am truly grateful for the support of everyone throughout the past couple of weeks.  Please forgive me if I have seemed distant, I have been too drained to really talk about much.

As of tomorrow I will no longer be a Peace Corps Volunteer.  I will stay in Morocco for a few days, and then I am off to Spain and Portugal..

I’ll have a few more posts about Peace Corps related things, but for the most part, this chapter of my life is finished.

A man can spend the day in fur-lined red Christmas shorts, a Christmas hat and a tank top and not realizes he looks completely ridiculous until he sees pictures of himself.  Those pictures are on facebook now, much as I detest facebook.  Flickr has limited my photo account so I can’t really put pictures up on my blog anymore with much ease (though I’m looking into other solutions).

I made apple pie, which is become trademark.  I’m losing interest in it.  I also watched David (from Guinea!) make eggnog, which, not surprisingly, consists of a crap-load of eggs, some whipped cream, and whatever alcohol you desire.  We used rum.

I had a good old time, staying up late, getting up early, and generally wearing myself out.  We played some of our astonishingly small number of board games.  I won and lost at scrabble.

So yeah, David, a volunteer from my time in Guinea, was here over the weekend, and we went to see the giraffes the day after Christmas.  It was a lot of fun.  Better was the time we got to spend just chatting.  It’s been a while since I’ve been able to hang out with a guy and just talk about life.  I think Eric’s visit this past summer was the last time.  The proportion of male to female volunteers in Niger is a little ridiculous, so it is more difficult than you might think.

Peace Corps Christmas is always a homey affair, full of wonderful smells, good hugs, and lots of tomfoolery.  The best meal was by far the eggplant parmesan, courtesy of Katelyn.  I drank eggnog and once again engaged in some emergency plumbing.  You find all kinds of foul things unclogging pipes.

Still, a Peace Corps Christmas is always lacking something.  Maybe it’s just snow.  But more, I think it’s a sense of warmth that you just don’t really get in a place that doesn’t feel like home.  Home for me conjures images of specific friends and family.  At Christmas is also conjures a warm light cast by a fire and the smell of a pine tree.  Thus do our childhoods weave themselves into the rest of our lives, not unlike verb-tense when writing a story, actually.

I end this year much as I ended last year: with the need to be like iron.  Only this year a cold brittle iron has been replaced by iron that is tempered by the warmth of my people: those who I would go to the ends of the earth for, and who would return the favor.  You are my foundation.  Thanks for that.

The adventure continues in 2011.