Reflections at a place so near to -- but not quite at -- the end

All over the place, I am! A swirling tide of emotions, waves crashing on the beach of my place in the world, with tears of rage and impatience, interminably slow minutes ticking away on the face of my cell phone...and then fleeting full happy moments that I capture with my heart and lock away in a special place forever. Time with the kids of my neighborhood, running around my yard frantically making me a meal with the leaves they've collected cooked over a fire of the wood they've gathered, spiced with all sorts of flavors I've given them money to run off and buy. Time with my favorite nun, surviving the whipping hurricane winds of the year's first storm while sitting in her house eating nõose and drinking beer. The number of days between me and a Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee is not very big, and I've been having pretty much every conceivable reaction to this fact.

New volunteers are in training right now, having arrived early June on the tail end of all of the civil unrest wildness that has defined 2011. There's been a whole lot of questioning on a whole lot of levels whether Konguossi would be getting one replacement volunteer or two, and where that volunteer would be working. Thomas and I have hashed and rehashed our opinions, thinking about things together and apart, pondering the degree to which our insights and ideas will really affect what the Peace Corps ultimately decides (and how much that, in turn, will actually come into play in the next person's experience).

Imagining someone else coming in to live where I've lived for the past two years -- where I've made impressions, both good and bad; where I've in some places succeeded, in some placed failed, and in others haven't even tried -- had been a roller coaster wave of emotions for me. But it's my town! What if people forget about me? What if they like this new person more than me? What if he or she accomplishes more, is a better volunteer, is more beloved by more people and my legacy, whatever it ends up being, is lost? What if people say negative things about me? If they comment on how much time I spent in Kongoussi instead of my house, if they talk about how few classes I had the year that I taught, about how much printer paper was used up by my lessons?

Along with this have been feelings of entitlement for my site. For my school, that deserves a volunteer after all the obstacle-surmounting they've done with the Peace Corps over the past four years. For Kongoussi in general, which really is a great place to live (and probably a lot more of a relaxing one if you don't have breasts and internal genitalia).

But really, it's been so difficult to imagine What Comes Next. So hard to get out of my own head, to not think of myself as the upstanding example of How To Be A Peace Corps Volunteer. How To Live In Kongoussi. How To Do It Right.

I recently had the pleasure of spending several days helping to show the soon-to-be Kongoussi Nasara around his future home. He came to town with his very dynamic counterpart, Madame Diallo, my school's French teacher. He stayed at Thomas's house (soon to be his, unless some drastic change occurs). And I...well, I freaking love him. He is simple in the best, most Burkinabè meaning of the word. He is kind, open, excited to be here, happy about Kongoussi, taking things as they come, going with the flow...the one thing I will, most likely, always insist is a prerequisite to Doing It Right. He's great.

And he's different than me. Of course he is. Everyone is their own person, everyone will approach their Peace Corps service slightly differently...like life. And he'll do things differently than the way I've done them, or that Thomas has done them, or Justin, or Robert, or Talato (bless her), or any of the other volunteers who have hefted their luggage out of the Peace Corps SUV and onto the red dirt of Kongoussi. He came to visit and I could feel Kongoussi as it began to become his town, as the Peace Corps moment started to shift out of my service and into his. And I was so happy to have been there to have this moment of transition with him, and I am so glad that he's happy to be taking on this adventure and this challenge. And I am happy and ready to leave my town, my little African home, to him to trip in it and live in it and laugh in it and learn from it.

A happy exchange. A good way to reach the end.

I'm content, and I'm ready to go.