Are you Experienced?

I've written before about the Peace Corps Experience - the experience you imagine when you think about the Peace Corps. I'm finding that our Peace Corps Experience does not end with the end of service.

I'm not saying we're signing up again, though that is a remote possiblity still, and I'm not saying we've been out giving talks and speeches about Timor since we've been back (though we did show our family a slideshow of all our most recent pictures the other night). It's actually hard to explain.

In the picture above you see Bekah and Kuku, our little dingo, not long before we were evacuated. We've been reflecting on our whole experience since then. Many emotions linked with many memories. There were really hard times, and thinking of those makes me happy to be home again. There were great times, too, too many to write out, actually. Fun with fellow PCVs, with our neighbors, with each other.

This morning Bekah was waving goodbye to me as she was going to the shower, just as a joke, and it reminded me of the way the kids would wave at me when I walked down the road and shout, "Charles, dah!" which means, "Charles, hey, wave!" The kids all called me Charles because Travis was too hard to say.

I didn't know those kids. But they knew me. And every day they'd say that to me when I walked by.

I said to my mom yesterday, "You know, I think the reason it's so hard to come back home is because we all made it such a big deal when we left." It was almost as if we were never coming back. But now we are back, and in some ways are worse off than when we left - suddenly unemployed and reverse culture shock on top of it. Many of our fellow volunteers are taking advantage of their time in Southeast Asia by traveling around. A few of us have come home already. One or two have decided what they want to do, like go back to school, but the rest of us are still trying to figure it all out.

I'll end with this, a little something to think about. My Peace Corps Experience was both harder than I imagined and better than I imagined.