"How Can I Help You, To Say Goodbye?"

~Patty Loveless

Lately it feels I’ve performed a bit of a nasty trick on this village I’ve come to love. I came here and pushed and shoved and found my way into their hearts, I’ve become accepted and referred to as family, only to turn around now and leave, with the prospects of ever coming back very faint and fuzzy. The reality of keeping in touch is grim, with as much work as it’s been for me to attempt it over these months I can’t imagine it will be either easy, or when I’m honest with myself, likely for me to keep in touch with most people from here. When I consider the fact that it was my job to come to understand and care about these people, just as now its part of my job to leave, it all seems a cruel joke.

There are a few people within the village who have been sort of nasty to me lately, and I don’t blame them. Goodbyes are never easy, and everyone reacts in their own way. Some people appear to be quite alright with me leaving, by their understanding I’ve come from some far off planet they don’t understand, and they’re quite nonchalant that the time has come for me to go back there. Many of the men in the village who have offered to marry me and many of the old women who have offered to set me up with their sons have been alternating cold and super friendly in their last ditch efforts to seal the deal with me.

A person in the road translated for me the other day that an old man was yelling at me about why I’m not pregnant yet. When I asked a friend about this, he explained that people are a bit insulted that I’m not leaving with a baby that I’ve made here. People I’ve spoken fluent English with the entire time that I’m here have recently refused to speak it with me at all. It appears that they have now become upset that I cannot speak Setswana, as how else will I explain the Batswana culture to people back home if I don’t bring home a Motswana child that I’ve made here, and teach all of America to speak Setswana (good luck guys). These things seem funny to us as Westerners, but are very serious to the people from my village. Highly educated people are only half kidding when they confront me about these issues. I’m beginning to see that they are worried about their impact on me as much as I worry about my lasting impact on them.

In some vaguely American feeling ways that haven’t died in me here I feel strangely guilty about my ability and desire to leave this place. It’s hard to leave when I know that for people here it’s not an option. I can safely say that few to none of the people in Seronga will ever leave the continent of Africa, much less manage to make it into the United States, and yet I guess that’s my plan, to up and head back. It’s a horribly abrupt premeditated departure.

And just as it’s hard for some people here to say goodbye to me, I’m finding it difficult to say goodbye to them. I often lack the words (in any language, never mind the fact that we don’t exactly share one) to effectively communicate my feelings of how much these people and this place have touched my life, or the magnitude of what they have taught me. There has been a colossal shift in my perspective and how I see the world, and so much of that comes from the people I’ve spent time with here. I feel both like a child leaving home for a first day of school and a parent leaving their child with the babysitter for the first time.

Or perhaps there will be no babysitter. I won’t know for sure until after I’m gone, but I may not be replaced. In which case the baby—the village—may have to take complete care of itself. Which it is obviously capable of, hell the place has been here for quite a few years before me, and it’s not like I’m the first Peace Corps Volunteer to have served here. But I want the work we’ve done here to continue. I often think of my proudest achievement is that I myself don’t feel like I’ve done that much, rather I’ve helped others learn what they are capable of, how they themselves can make an impact, so what difference should my leaving really make?

I write my site report, a document intended to be less than four pages giving the basics of the village and yet the paragraphs keep coming. Notes about whom to contact in case of this or that, who can help with the transport of this or that, or who can provide you with vegetables, who has chickens, who might have spare petrol on hand. Last minute emergency numbers on a pad on the fridge. All for a person who may or may not come here.

With each little note, each small instruction, I find something growing in me, a hope that whomever encounters this place after me (be they Peace Corps or researchers or whomever) might feel the same love for it, approach it with the same passion, even as I wish it I know it is not possible. I know my experience has been unique, as they all inevitably are, but what other feeling can you have when leaving a place that has come to mean so much, has shaped you so powerfully? I want to screen them and run background checks! I want to interview and scrutinize any white person that comes through this village (as there is inherently a big responsibility in being white in this and I would wager many small African villages) for any reason to determine if they have it in them to fully appreciate this village for what it is, and to ensure that they will do all in their power to build it up, and love it and help it grow, and to protect it from harm. I can’t help but feel protective of Seronga, all the while knowing how I must let it, and all the people here, go.

As I prepare to leave Seronga, I’m struck by the similarities to the ways I felt when I left other places which have shaped me. They are places I think back to with longing, like in Minneapolis or Duluth. I drive away from these places that have challenged me in some way, that have earned my love with much more sadness than the places I left which have been lacking in personality. I never felt that sense of loss in leaving a suburb (sorry ghetto CR. And Shakopee, despite my residing in and decorating one of your houses, you were never home.)

Being the Lekgowa (white person) in such a small community, the people of Seronga are there and up in my business whether I want them to be or not (as I sit in the hut writing and coughing my lungs out half naked and sweating with fever, my sister Keitikile knocks at the screen door, as she’s heard me hacking and wants to know what the nature of my illness is. I give her the generic answer, which is flu, and she offers to send the children on the compound to the store for orange juice. When the co-op doesn’t have any, the children arrive at the screen door bearing armloads of green unripe oranges from the tree outside my window every few hours). People here know when I’ve been away for more than a day and want to know where I was and what I was doing and with whom, much like any parent of a teenager. If I’m out of the village for more than a few hours I know to expect phone calls and text messages, from people just wanting to “check me”. I know they care about me.

And I about them.

I feel, almost indignantly and surely unfoundedly, that I must prove that I know this place. This has been MY place, I have been hers, and we have been each others. I have in many cases taken “Seronga” as my de facto surname, many of my friends in other places know me as Jen Seronga, which is what they refer to me as over the radio in the bush planes. Seronga and I didn’t experience love at first sight, (or in this case first site), rather we had the sort of passionate love affair that grew over time, with each volley back and forth or challenge and reaction, with triumph and surrender. I feel a senseless possessiveness, as though the jealousy I’ve never quite come to feel over a lover is manifesting itself in my feelings of a place.

Somewhere along this journey, which started out as a difficult to fathom 27 months, the feverous countdown that ruled my first few months faded into the background, the march of time gone by getting bigger and the time remaining becoming smaller. At some point there was a shift and rather than a countdown, this became my actual life. It was no longer an experience with an end date but LIFE. Real life. I haven’t been on some escape or vacation or break the past two years, I’ve been living, and working, and even though sometimes I don’t take it seriously or convey that to those back home, it is.

And in that life there has been an investment.

I’ve given something here. Beyond the two years of my life and all that goes with that, I’ve given my passion and my energy and bits and pieces of myself. And it’s been good. And I’ve gained a lot. But at this point, any semblance of balance is long gone. There are elements of my life that involve mere survival, big elements, and it’s no way to become engrained in permanently living. Bush life is a hard life. And I’ve lived it. And now it’s time to be done.

I’ve come to care deeply about the people in and the essence of Seronga, and our stories have become interwoven. I’ve fought with and for and against this place, emerging from this battle bruised and battered and in some cases bleeding but in the end deeply and profoundly in love. As with any relationship that touches you so deeply to the core- how can you easily know when to say enough is enough? How do you calmly and gracefully walk away without the sting of little pieces of you being unceremoniously ripped out?

You don’t. But you leave it anyways, because it’s time. You trust that the words they’ve said a million times when it appears that a project or event is going to fall completely apart are true. “Don’t wodddy, Lorato. It will be Ohhh Kaaay.”

And you hope and pray, to their Gods and yours that it will.