In for a dime...

In a country where the internet is permanently stuck in low gear, it's difficult to tear oneself away from email accounts and the bog of Facebook to update a blog. I'm trying to do a better job of documenting my time here, but even the hours of downtime that could be spent writing have been spent reading others' scribblings, hanging out in dukas, or wasted on elaborate schemes to make bank in the exciting pig farming and mushroom cultivation industries here in glorious Tanzania. One by one, the days have passed and I have about two pages in my journal to account for the past 7 months of my life abroad; an inexcusable grievance which my future self will likely find unforgivable.

This seems like a good point in my service to start anew as this week marked a new beginning, or rather an older beginning's end. My sitemate, Jessica, hopped on a plane Wednesday night and is stateside at the moment. As with most people who early terminate, she won't be coming back. We were in the same training class and were the only volunteers placed in our banking town of Same. Over the past months, she quickly became family to me and I in all honesty consider her a sister. We wasted weekends together, traveled together and shot the shit in such a way that made other English speakers rather uneasy at our awesomely comparable audacity. I couldn't explain what life has been like here without due mention of my sis. And at the same time, I know that the remaining time will have to be defined in a large part by her absence.

If you talk to returned volunteers, they'll tell you how the friends you make during service are so incredibly meaningful in a way that is unexplainable and only understood by those who've been through it. I didn't understand it then. I think I understand it now. And it sucks. They don't tell you that part.

In for a dime, in for a dollar. Ni maisha tu.