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| Our Close of Service Photo by Richard Sitler (also tagged on Facebook) |
Passing the two year mark often inspires a tremendous amount of reflection on the part of us the Volunteers, as well as our staff and friends who watched us get off the plane what seems like yesterday. We have all changed so much, grown in ways we could have never imagined, met people we would later marry, followed interests that would turn into passions, and taken steps that would lead us down a path we could have never mapped out. Not just a few of us, but dozens of us. Maybe all of us.
I love what this experience has helped me learn, who it has helped me become, and how it has helped me grow. I have found in Peace Corps that people will want to love you, to bring you into their world and make you a part of it. Instead of retreating from that and holding onto old views of right and wrong, good and bad, success and happiness, I appreciate what has happened as I've let go. As I've let loose of my grip and fallen from where I was, I feel like where I stand now is maybe somewhere a little more down to earth.
Peace Corps, for me, represents as much a way of life as it does an experience in my life. To ask what Peace Corps has meant to me is to ask who I am and who I have become. I feel like my world has expanded, I can see further and wider than I ever have before and somehow that makes me feel lost and found at the same time. Maybe I lost who I was and found who I am.
