We Are Not Mountains

This will be the last entry of this blog. We have enjoyed writing it, and we thank you for reading.

We left Lusaka at 7:25pm on February 1, 2010. In the days preceding our departure, we said a lot of goodbyes and gave and received a lot of remembrances. Remembrances are things (anything) that you give to someone when you part to remember you by. People always ask for these, and, while we hesitate to give things to people so as not to give the impression of unfairness, we did have quite a lot of things we were not bringing back to the States, so we distributed them as fairly and equitably as possible. This mostly involved splitting up our clothes among the students and our staff and their families. In turn, we received a couple shirts and a necklace. People also like to send greetings, so our family and friends in Zambia send greetings to you, our family and friends in America, even if they don’t know you.

All of the goodbyes culminated in the goodbyes we said to the eight FEF-U students who we have lived with for the past eighteen months. These are the people who we have been closest to. We have become family, so it was incredibly difficult to part. We had a farewell dinner at the house the day before we left and everyone exchanged kind words. A few students even thanked our families for allowing us to come, recognizing how difficult it must have been. In the end, we all agreed that this was not goodbye, but see you later.

In dealing with all these partings, we keep coming back to a sentiment that one of the Sudanese students expressed upon the departure of one of the other students who was resettled to America over a year ago. He brought it up again in the past week in relation to us because he said it helps him deal with goodbyes. The sentiment is that people are not mountains. We move. If there are two mountains separated by some distance, they will never meet, no matter how many decades pass, but people can meet. So, as we leave Africa, we leave with the knowledge that we are not mountains.