home sweet home

While writing this I am currently sitting at JFK and marveling at the huge amount of white people passing by me and how I am no longer special or different, but instead how I blend in incredibly well. I have traveled about 25 hours so far and should be home in another 5. Crazy how long it takes to get from Kenya to Cazenovia… but it almost seems like too little time since I feel like I am traveling to another planet. As much as I subscribe to the idea that people are people everywhere (since that’s one of the major lessons I have learned), life seems to be so different here… maybe cultural difference, maybe because it’s my home and I feel the most comfortable.

All I know is that I’m back and while it seems completely unreal that I am actually here, somehow now my two years of life and work and Kenya seems so distant. I don’t know how that happens so quickly, but it does. The last few weeks in Kenya were very bittersweet. While I was so excited to be going home, to see friends and family and eat good food and take hot showers, I was devastated to be leaving behind this life and this place that I fell in love with. My job, my friends, my boyfriend and my life for the last two years have been in Kisumu. Then suddenly (well not too suddenly), I had to say goodbye to it. And not “goodbye I’ll be back soon”, but my “life is moving on and I don’t know when I will see you all or come back to Kenya” goodbye. It was horrible. Saying goodbye to my staff, who are absolutely amazing people who I spent all day every day with….The good thing is that they are so good at what they do, I know that work will continue as I left it without a hitch. Leaving KYFA was a huge deal. It was my first real job and with all honesty, most likely the best job I will ever have. How many people can say they honestly feel like the work they do, the getting up every day and going to the office work, actually helps people… that children and local people derive enjoyment from my work… that people’s lives have significantly changed for the better because of an organization.... I am so lucky to have been put in a position to be able to affect such change. I worked hard and I’m proud of the work I’ve done, but more than proud I am encouraged… I’m not saying that everyone has the potential to change the world or save the world or whatever, but that people (Americans at least) are given a chance to be here, to exist, and what we chose to do with that existence is our own choice and no one has the right to judge other people’s choices. We are damn lucky to have been born in a place where we have choices, where we are able to make decisions for ourselves. Much of the rest of the world is not so fortunate to be born into a society of free will and of choices.

I can’t even really conceptualize what I want to say right now or wrap up my two years of life experience into a blog post. All I know is what I have personally learned: people are people, they love, laugh, cry, live and die in whatever corner of the world they exist. With our world becoming more interconnected, I honestly hope everyone is given a chance sometime in their life to visit a place that is unlike where they are from. Maybe then our world will become an even more wonderful place than it is now!