August 5th, I dragged myself out of my hostel bed at 4 AM. My exhausted brain made it hard to get my things together, chug a Greek yogurt, and flop down in the lobby to wait for the airport shuttle, but somehow I made it.
Sixteen hours later, I was home-- or at least, at my parents' current house in Baltimore. My mom, dad, and aunt were all waiting for me at the baggage claim with a Welcome Home sign, making it feel like a truly momentous occasion to be back in the USA.
I spent a week in Baltimore with my family and pets (who are adjusting nicely to life in the US and will be with my parents for the time being, until I figure out my life). Then my dad and I hit the road to Monterey, where I'll be for at least the next semester finishing my graduate school studies. We stopped at Universal Studios along the way to see Harry Potter World, which had been my dream ever since I'd heard about its opening back in spring. It was a much-needed day of fun before dealing with the housing search, health insurance, car registration, and all the myriad Adult things that we Millennials so excel at.
School started last week and I couldn't be more thrilled. It's amazing to be back and studying the subject I love in a program taught by the best professional environmentalists in California. I love being part of the multi-cultural academic world of MIIS and I'll be heartbroken when it's time to graduate. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's being a student. Hopefully what I learn there will be transferrable to the real world, when the time comes.
So what's it like being back in the US? The short answer is, pretty great. The long answer is: Overwhelming, fantastic, weird, exhausting, and everything in the middle.
Mostly, my overriding emotion over the last month has been sweet, sweet relief. My time in Panama was getting really tedious by the end. I won't say that I hate Panama, but I will say that I was starting to hate living there by the end. The fun, what-an-amazing-tropical-adventure! feeling had started to fade sometime around the transition between 1st and 2nd year of service, and by the last few months, every day felt like a trial. Dealing with life in a third-world country was far from easy, and life at site wasn't fulfilling enough to make up for the everyday struggles like wading through endless bureaucracy, the constant staring and street harassment, the blatant misogyny of life in a patriarchal society, the heat, the mosquitoes, etc. etc. etc.
Still, I had a lot of great memories. I'll always remember my Peace Corps days fondly. I'm just, well, really happy to be back.
The hardest parts about being back have been, in no particular order:
-Learning how to drive again, especially on the highway
-Making friends and relating to people my age who aren't or haven't been in Peace Corps (luckily, Monterey has a huge RPCV community so I don't have to!)
-Controlling myself when it comes to eating, because there's good food everywhere
-I tried for like an hour and I still don't understand how to use Snapchat. Seriously, help
I think I can attribute the relative ease of my transition to American life to being in the greatest place on Earth: Monterey, California. I appreciate it about a thousand times more than I did before Peace Corps. I mean, we have perfect weather (65 degrees and partly cloudy from now until forever!). The fruits and vegetables are local, year-round, and incomparable. I live two blocks from the beach, three from downtown, and four from campus. You can walk down the street and hear six different languages spoken and see people of all different countries and cultures. I don't get stared at, catcalled, or sweat half a gallon just from walking a few blocks. In fact, most days I need to wear long sleeves or a sweatshirt. I feel active, healthy, and I eat vegetables multiple times a day. In short, it's everything I wanted for the past two years and more.
Granted, this place has its problems. Urban poverty is huge and extremely visible to me in a way that it wasn't before Peace Corps. Certainly there are government and charity programs that help people out, but not enough, and Monterey has a LOT of people who roam around all day with everything they own on their backs and nowhere to go at night. The local newspaper even did a story about students from the local community college who can't afford housing, or even just can't find a place (you can read it here: www.montereycountyweekly.com/news/cover_collections/numerous-csumb-students-battle-homelessness/article_83f65c18-6a50-11e6-b6d2-5716098389b1.html) . They have to camp at the beach or sleep on the sand dunes because there isn't enough affordable housing. All of that seems like complete insanity to me. America is the richest country in the world. Economic inequality is our society's biggest failure. The fact that rich tourists come from miles, spending thousands of dollars on air fare, rental cars, and hotels to hang out at the aquarium and eat ice cream on the pier while people who live here don't even have a roof over their heads is astonishing to me.
In Panama, poverty seemed different somehow. Certainly the people I lived with were poor, but they had at least a simple house to sleep in, and land to grow food on, and a family to support them. And I rarely saw people who looked like they had nowhere to go in the cities, either. Maybe it's the stronger family structure, or any number of different factors. Poverty and especially homelessness in America seems like a very lonely experience. So that's been a difficult concept for me to process, and definitely something I didn't think about much before Peace Corps.
So, just like everything in life, it's a mixed bag. Peace Corps has definitely helped open my eyes to see how lucky and privileged I am, and it's made me grateful for what I have, but also more aware of what other people don't have. And that's a pretty bitter pill to swallow.
Deep societal issues aside, my day-to-day life is great, so it's hard to complain. I'm sure the novelty of being in school will wear off soon, but for now I love it, even the never-ending homework, papers, and projects. Maybe I have more real-world context now, or maybe I'm just older and wiser, or maybe I just spent so many days being so bored, sitting in my hammock reading beach novels and watching the yucca grow, that having something to do is an improvement. I even applied for a short-term job, interviewing migrant farmers around Monterey County about their experience working for Fair Trade companies. It kind of sounded like something I'd be good at.
And so life goes on. I remain as always terrible at taking pictures, but here's a few from the last month.