Going Back

I suppose this had to come at some point. In a short few months, I will pack my Cambodian life into a few small bags and begin the journey back towards (what I have recently started calling) “The Great American Adventure.” The plane tickets have been bought, COS conference is done and over with, and the paperwork is slowly beginning to diminish in size. I have listened to countless horror stories about what it is like to return to America after living abroad for so long, but I am confident in my abilities to adapt to strange and different places.

There remain only a few projects to wrap up, and I feel that I am busier than usual trying to finish all of the little side projects that I started. On top of this, not a day goes by when someone around here anxiously asks when I have to go back to America, and whether or not I will miss Cambodia when I go over to the other side of the world. In fact, there are lists of lists of things that I will miss and things that I will not. These grow bigger as the days go by. Just yesterday afternoon I added yet another episode of something I will miss when I am back in the “world.” I was out taking a walk in the remaining drops of the monsoon rains. My usual route goes past the house of one of my students, as well as the sweet stand that she and her mother manage. When I walked past the latter, her mother called me over to say hello. We chatted for a bit, and she commented on how silly my Vietnamese hat looked that I was using to shield my head from the rain. I would have bought my usual dtuck au luck from her, but I apologized to her for not bringing out my wallet into the rain. She said it was no matter, and gave me a glass of iced tea anyway. Her daughter came over and we commented on how the rain was badly needed, and that it was wonderful to finally see the fields burst into green. And as I sat there sipping my tea, I thought for a moment about how I will miss all of this; being invited out of the rain for tea, wearing silly Vietnamese hats, and talking about the status of the monsoon rains. Then again I will not miss the constant bickering with tuk tuk drivers, the heat, the mosquitoes, the periodic bouts of stomach illnesses, the really aggressive prostitutes, and the bureaucracy of both the American and Cambodian governments.

It will definitely be a mixed bag of feelings when I do actually leave.