Two year anniversary

Two years ago today, I arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi with 41 other Peace Corps trainees.

When I started this blog, the plan was that it would last 26 months and then I wasn't sure what would happen after that. I figured that this two year post would be the beginning of the end. Things haven't exactly gone according to plan.

Obviously, leaving Peace Corps after 14 months was a big part of that. But that's actually been a relatively minor change, since most of what I've been doing in 2010 feels like how I would have wanted my Peace Corps service to run. I guess the biggest change has been my expectations. (In case you're wondering about physical changes, I've returned to a healthy weight, so the biggest change there is probably the decrease in how much hair I have on my head.)

A lot of people join Peace Corps and other similar programs expecting to change the world and leave their lasting mark on a community. I wasn't so ambitious, which is not to say that I was hoping for insignificance, but rather, I figured that the biggest changes would be in my personal development and any benefits accrued by the community would be icing on the cake.

In each stage of my life, I feel like I became a wholly new person and I figured that the sequence would continue. And in a way it has. But I am not sure that I would almost call it personal regression, rather than personal development. I've been hardened by a lot of my experiences here. Some have created unhealthy levels of bitterness which I would love to move past. It's also helped me to revert to some of my more introverted tendencies (I have spent a lot of my life alternating between introversion and extroversion). Sure, I have plenty of adventures with my friends, but I spend much more time wanting to be alone than to socialize. I have more difficulty trusting people these days. My math skills (math used to be one of my favorite hobbies. Yep, I'm a big nerd.) have plummeted, and my Spanish and French are pretty weak these days (although on the flip side, my reading, writing and Kiswahili skills are probably at their strongest ever).

Well, I haven't exactly painted a pretty rosy picture so far, but then, many of my other posts are looking through rose-colored glasses, so I tend to use these reflective posts to look at larger trends. I wouldn't trade my experiences and lessons learned over the past two years for anything. It's definitely instilled a bit of patience in me (not much, but at least it's a start). I also worked out most of my argumentative tendencies (though sometimes those bubble just below the surface). And most importantly, I've built some really important friendships, with people who I probably never would have met or become close with were it not for our shared experiences over here.

At this point, I can't really say if I'll be over here for one more year or five more years or longer or shorter. However, I do know that I've barely scratched the surface of what I can learn out here.