Following Mid-Service Conference, I had 3.5 weeks at post before I had to make my way South again, for the GREs. I felt really guilty about this. I signed up for the GREs several months ago, knowing that I would have to make a second trip down South after not taking any time off at all during my first year. Plus, I hate that I am missing Youth Day activities, especially since this year, I have gotten to know a lot of the students through my work, unlike Youth Day last year, when I sat through the events and hardly recognized a face.

My time at post went by surprisingly fast. I had a bunch of things to try to pick up from where I left them in December, and for projects like Women’s Day (March 8), I had to talk to some authorities earlier than usual. Nevertheless, I’m really hopeful about planning a Women’s Day event with nearby Volunteers: soap and lotion-making! I also just got involved working in a nearby village, Gance, with a youth association that has some goals but just needs to know how to get there. So, at the meeting, I had the leader brainstorm ideas and write down specific steps the group will take each month, between now and September. Goal-setting is just one of those things that can come naturally to us but literally seems foreign to a lot of people here.

Here’s what else I was up to:

• Soy, inventory, and computer classes at hospital: At the hospital, I did my typical soy animations every week and continued teaching computer classes in the afternoon to nurses. I also worked on the inventory again with Boukar (who handles inventory with Myra) and continued training him on how to use Excel.
• Moringa: I also watered my moringa trees at the hospital everyday. Moringa is a great plant. Its leaves are really nutritious (protein! iron! calcium! Vitamin A and C!) which is great because malnutrition is a major health concern where I am. People prepare it in a sauce with couscous. (The Volunteer before me planted several moringa trees in the yard, so I have a lot of moringa that I share with my friends to cook with. I sometimes add it to my pasta sauce. Once, I tried adding fresh leaves with my pancake batter. It was… not terrible. I wouldn’t recommend that, however.) However, a lot of people don’t know about it or don’t know how to get it.  So, many Volunteers promote moringa in their work, to work towards increasing well-nourished communities. Last September, after the first day of the Kolofata girls camp, Jess and Martin helped me prepare the polypots, and again, in October, with Jake, an American medical student. Finally, in November, I planted 15 of them around the hospital grounds, with the help of John, the gardener, who agreed to water them for me while I was gone. Most of them died (including a few where a child must have decided to yank the leaves and stems out!) but there are still 4 or 5 that are going strong.
• Girls Empowerment Club: My Girls Club held a meeting. They’re supposed to meet every week, but it doesn’t always happen. I then invited my Girls Club over to my house on a Saturday afternoon for a more casual meeting, where I showed them how to make pancakes and peanut butter cookies It was crazy having 15+ girls over. We talked for a bit about menstrual cycles – that was briefly discussed at our meeting in December – and then about goal-setting, where they envision their lives in one, five, and ten years. The girls are still so shy, though, and I still hope that they will open more up.
• Teaching English: I also started teaching English four mornings a week at CETIC, the technical high school, since the former teacher got assigned to teach in Maroua, the regional capital. At the government high school, I got involved with preparations for Bilingualism Week. In addition to helping the students prepare various skits the English teacher and students came up with, I wrote a skit in English on cholera, hoping that the Health Club would present it as an opportunity for peer education. The English teacher and Health Club sponsor both told me that they really liked the skit, so I was excited for it. The Health Club president first told me that he would himself be in it, along with two other classmates, but in the end, they didn’t want to get involved. The sponsor told me that it was because the kids “flee” when something involves English. Maybe I should have approached it differently, then. But luckily, other students were willing to do it.

Anyway, what people said was true – going away for five weeks really made me miss Kolofata. Even saying goodbye to my friends back in December was strangely emotional. My family in Belgium gave me a ton of little gifts like jewelry, toys, and books to hand out, but I didn’t want to give out gifts just yet. Instead, I handed out photos instead that I got developed in Belgium. People here LOVE photos of themselves. For people I worked with, I emphasized that it was a symbol of thanks for their work, since people always expect gifts anyway even when I just go to Maroua (and then get upset when I tell them I didn’t bring them anything.) I visited tons of people at their houses, whether to just say hello or to give out photos, which led to me having dinner three times in one night. My stomach hurt so much, but people kept insisting that I eat more. I love this hospitality.

I’ll also never forget Asta’s reaction when she had apparently misunderstood when I told her that I printed out several photos of her family to say thank you for her hospitality, since Asta has been a really great friend to me. She just said “Pas de probleme!” When I later got up to leave, she pointed to the photos I left on the mat, and said, “Et les photos?” She obviously didn’t understand that I meant for her to keep them, and I explained again, “C’est pour vous!” she just had such a huge smile on her face.

There was just so much that I had missed. My friends. And my friend’s kids. Asta’s young son once again asked me, “Ou est ton enfant?” He’s asked me this before. Even though I insist that I have no children, to him, a grown woman cannot possibly be childless, so therefore I must have at least a child or two hidden away somewhere. And I also missed other simple pleasures like walking around my village or riding my bike. I was so sedentary in Belgium. Over the past few weeks, I rode my bike to Mora twice (22 km each way), as well as to a few smaller villages for work. I love biking, though I somehow forgot how sandy and bumpy the road is. (Several months ago, I was at friend’s house, and he pointed to the radio and said, “They say they’re going to pave the road between Kerawa and Mora!” Kerawa is 10 km from Kolofata. I got really excited, but then he explained to me, “No, politicians say that every year.” Oh.)

My first year in Peace Corps has been full of so many ups and downs, and part of me really just didn’t want to come back and wanted to stay in Belgium and eat cheese and take hot showers everyday (I guess I would’ve had to eventually go back to the US rather than bumming around my aunt’s house). But as cliched at it sounds, I remember being back and, while waiting for my food to cook, looking up at the night sky – seeing a brighter moon and more stars than I ever saw in Belgium – and I thought to myself, “It’s going to be okay.”