For as long as my battery lasts, I am writing this entry from the plane.  I’ve changed my watch to NY time and the several cups of tea I drank are keeping me bright-eyed and awake until enough time passes and it becomes a normal NY hour for sleep.  It’s almost 5:00pm there.  We have 15 hours to go.  We left for the airport in Lilongwe at 11:00am for a 1:00 flight that took us to Johannesburg, where we had a 5-hour lay-over. Past security and immigration, we walked through a crowded terminal with an abundance of stores, restaurants and functioning credit card machines, all of which was so over stimulating.  We found a place to sit and shared a bottle of wine that helped us escape and made those 5 hours pass by quickly.  As we drank and ate one last meal before our flight home, we mostly talked about the people we already left behind.  I’m feeling so fortunate that someone coming home to the same city will be a constant reminder of this experience.  I already know there will be many times Deena and I will want to reminisce and share the inevitable adjustments we will experience when we return to our lifestyles so vastly different from that which we embraced in Malawi.  Neither of us had ever spent so much time with one person, and we learned how incredible it could be to do so, especially in the midst of a project like ours.  Deena, when you read this, thank you for that and for everything we shared at school, at kwa Benesi, the lake, and even for the hours of doing not much of anything other than lots of yoga at Area 49.  Nothing about my time would have been the same without you.

I just looked through pictures Raphael took of us that he gave us on a flash drive before we left.  These picture captured moments during our welcoming and goodbye ceremonies when I was so unaware of the camera. Reliving those moments, if only through a few images, reminds me of how many mixed emotions I feel on this long journey home.

On the one hand, I’m devastated.  Memories are swirling through my head.  Images of the people I lived with and loved are still so vivid.  I can hear Mama saying one of the only complete sentences in English she ever expressed “Daughter, I will be very sad when you leave.”  I picture Papa dressed up for our goodbye ceremony sitting on the floor, even after we offered up our chairs.  I can feel the pure bliss that came every Monday when we returned to the village and reunited with our family, the excitement of which is captured by the way Kevin and I ran to each other every week.  And the children —- I hear their little giggles, I hear them screaming “JOANNA, DEENA,” as we walked through the village, and I see our students so focused on the materials in front of them – connecting blocks, looking at pictures in books, helping each other clean up and knowing to form lines with their group once the materials were put away.  I smell the dinners Diana and Mama made for us every night and smile thinking about the number of times we played cards with them before bed, calling out “punishment” every time someone made a mistake.  I could keep going.  These images, the sounds, the smells, they make me want to go back.  They make me wish I were staying longer.

As I allow these thoughts to twist and turn, hoping they will stick as strongly as they say Mkongamira does to those in the village, I am also thinking about what’s on the other end of this plane ride.  At 8:00am, my parents will be at JFK with a different kind of embrace, one that’s so familiar, so comfortable and so reassuring.   If not for my parents, this trip would have never happened.  Their support is what gave me the strength and courage to do something so far outside of my comfort zone.  I am forever grateful to them and can’t wait to retell the tale of this experience.  And then I’ll return to everyone I can’t wait to see again when I’m home.

As difficult as it was to leave, as absolutely heart-wrenching it felt to say our final goodbyes with the uncertainty of if and when I will reunite with the people I grew to adore, I am returning to a life that I love.  I am going back to the developed world, and though it may feel overwhelming at first, I know I will quickly acclimate because that’s what I know and that’s the world in which I will have the opportunity to continue to do this work, even if from afar.  Experiences like this inevitably shape you in so many ways, many of which can’t possibly evolve until you return to what you know.  There is a curiosity that I have to explore exactly how what I know now and how I feel about the connections I formed and the project I executed will manifest itself in what’s yet to come, both professionally and personally.  What I do know is that I am going home with an even stronger passion to study the way systems work, particularly those impacting the disadvantaged, and after this experience, I just may fall into an international focus, one that might afford me the opportunity to go back to Malawi sooner than I realize.  Mostly, I am hungry to keep learning, to keep investigating the methods we could employ to not just give aid to those in need, but to do more, to empower people to become self-sufficient using methods that are sustainable within the framework of their lifestyle.

There is so much ahead, so much I can’t wait to experience and discover.  In the meantime, I’m sitting on this flight, more calm about the length of the trip than I was before we took off.  I’m relaxed, stretching often to protect my aching back, and mostly thinking back on my life in the village with a smile.