Confounded

I leave my site on Wednesday night.

Since this summer I have been looking forward to this moment. Now that it is here, I find that I am in no way ready to say goodbye to the place that has become my home. Friday was my last day of classes at the University and involved me crying at different points in time and trying to express what my students have meant to me and failing often quite miserably or in one case, coming across rather cold because I just had nothing left to say.

My trivia game went over quite well though, as I had a bunch of extra things from the apartment in a bag and asked questions about myself and the student with the correct answer would pull something out of the bag and have a nice little memento from their American teacher. My favorite question involved asking my age, since no student got it right on the first try and it would evolve into a lowering of the prior mentioned age. It got as low as 22. Was as high as 31 in one class though...Hmm.. The best gift seemed to be a Merriam Webster dictionary that a boy pulled out who did not come to class often. I could see the girls eyeing it jealously as they had put more into my classes, but hey, a prize is a prize. He looked at it the rest of class, looking through it and somehow mezmerized. At the end of the class he asked if it came all the way from Pennsylvania. "Nope, it came from another PCV before me. It's probably from Hawaii." "Hawaii," he repeated, his eyes getting even bigger. No doubt that he'll keep that dictionary for some time to come.

Part of the reason leaving the university has been so difficult is because for months I have been operating under the assumption that they would be getting a replacement, another PCV to take over and the students would have another native speaker. I was excited for them and glad that the university wanted to continue working with the program. Then the university found out who the new volunteer would be, and turned Peace Corps down without meeting the new volunteer. It left me in an awkward position, on one hand understanding the director's decision and the other teachers' concerns, yet the students seemed so bummed to not be getting another PCV. It also threw a hitch into some of the outgoing speeches I was going to make and lessening some of the intense emotions that come with leaving a site. But what can you do?

So, I move onto cleaning and getting rid of stuff. Because of some fericous storms hitting the area I have been crippled in getting a lot of things done. I need to get money out of an atm--none work. I need to mail boxes home--the lights go out at the post office. Both of these things involve taking a lot of time to either just wait or search for a place that does work, so not all tasks that were supposed to be completed on Sunday are done now on Monday night. As I talked to a local PCV on Sunday afternoon--I don't know why I am surprised. After two years of living in Ukraine, what made me think that anything would go according to plans?

I still have one more meeting with English clubs and the final goodbye at the train station. Students are promising to show up. We'll see who does. It's going to be a sad one indeed, and I invite people to call me after 7:30pm my time to remind me that there is a life on the other side of the pond. It's just so sad to leave all my dear friends, especially when everything back in America seems so uncertain.