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9/7/2006
The position that I have taken with the Peace Corps requires that I commit to 27 months of service in Mozambique. Two years of work. Three months of training.
Two years ago, I was just starting my junior year of college. Twenty-seven months ago, it was still summer. I was getting over mono. I was diagnosed with mono the day after getting a summer job at the book publishing company and had to quit before my first day. That was the
first job that I found after returning from a semester studying in Spain. Twenty-seven months before today, I was returning home after my first time crossing the ocean six months before, the longest time I've ever spent away from home.
I had less facial hair two years ago. I lived at home. Mom still had the green Saturn. I drove it to a temp job working on sheet metal for the summer that remained after I got over mono. That summer, I wore a lot of t-shirts with holes from where the corners of the sheet metal had
caught.
I started listening to Spanish rhythms. I tried cooking tortilla español for my brothers and spilled raw egg all over the kitchen while flipping the tortilla in the pan. I tried to process all of the ideas that I acquired in Spain, thinking about the walks, the meals, about some new appreciation for time spent with family and friends. I told that story about Nathan and me running with the bulls across the drawbridge of Ciudad Rodrigo to everyone I talked to all summer. Or that time we woke up early, ate churros and drank hot chocolate, and then climbed to the top of the snow-covered mountain peak in sneakers and jeans damp to the knees. Or, how we walked down dirt paths through a valley of grape vines, how the vineyard owner invited us into his house on the hill to taste his best wine and pick olives from the trees in his backyard. Or, the time that, exhausted from a long uphill hike, I ordered pudding at the restaurant in O Cebrero, the village on top of the highest hill, and got to meet the cow who made it. He was in the restaurant with us.
Two years before two years ago, I had just graduated from high school. I was getting ready for the next stage in my life: Saint Louis University. I was packing, preparing to leave home, making last-minute runs to Target, saying goodbye to family and friends.
Today, I started packing, said goodbye to a college friend, thought about going to Target, didn't, and wrote on a list to do it tomorrow.
In three weeks, I leave from Chicago to Philadelphia to Mozambique. Twenty-seven months from now is the first time I will be here in this place again. Two days ago, I looked from a cliff in Dubuque onto the Mississippi river and observed that the same water flows over a particular place only once.
