the beginning has almost just begun

There are many moments in my last few days in the United States that are still crystal clear to me as if it happened yesterday. I remember struggling through goodbye to very close friends, sitting on my bedroom floor trying to figure out how to organize everything in my suitcases, hugging my mom and uncle goodbye at the airport fighting back tears and slowly walking to security, and crying in the airplane as the west coast disappeared… and then crying again a couple hours later in the airplane lavatory. There was this enormous feeling of finally getting to start what I had been waiting for the past 13 months even though for so long Paraguay seemed like a very distant future. Now, that time of leaving home feels so far away and unreachable as if in a different world. Strangely enough, I find myself getting ready to say goodbye again and packing up everything I own (or at least everything I brought with me to Paraguay plus at least 17 handbooks and enormous medical kit Peace Corps has made me drag along) and move again. A couple days ago, our training group had a little goodbye party in our community with our language teachers and our families and as certain trainees or family members gave little speeches, I realized I had tears in my eyes. All of my first memories of Paraguay are in Santo Domingo and it became clear that I could not have done or learned what I have without my family or my language teachers. While I have often times been very frustrated or impatient with some of them, they have been absolutely foundational to my training experience. My host families here opened up their home to me and I was welcomed as another daughter and sister in their family and I will miss them when I leave. While it is not nearly as hard to leave my family and community here as it was for me to leave the United States, it is still a bitter-sweet goodbye.

On Friday morning, all of us trainees will be swearing in at the US embassy as official Peace Corps Volunteers and will all be in site by Tuesday. It is really only then that our work officially starts, or at least if you count sitting around drinking terere with different families and learning more Guarani work. I don’t plan on doing much else except for starting a garden at my future house and playing with my new dog and probably reading a lot for at least the first 3 to 4 weeks. I keep on thinking that I’ve been away from home for such a long time and thinking I totally have this whole Peace Corps thing down. And then I realize that I have not even been here for a full three months and even if I have training all figured out, I still have 24 months of being in site by myself. My adventure here has in fact only just begun.