I have arrived home safely (although a bit tired). My last week in South Africa I was unable to report because my parents had come and we did some travel around where I was living, including a trip to a safari lodge. It was a great adventure being able to show my parents around where I grew up and the people I fell in love with. On the day my parents arrived I had a meeting with the school governing board in the village that we are working in, so they had the chance to see who we are working with on our after school program in the village. They were also sweet enough to take me back to Mary’s village to say goodbye to my second family. When Mary had told Mama that I was leaving she got very mad that I may not be coming to say goodbye and that it was just not right for me to come a couple times and not say goodbye; because of this my parents graciously agreed to drive to Mary’s village to say goodbye to everyone. While the language barrier made it difficult for both of the families to talk my mom could see the love that Mary’s mom had for me and why I considered her to be a second mother.
The safari adventure that we went on was a great experience to have and I got to see a leopard and lions along with elephants, rhinos, water buffalo, giraffes, and zebras. However, the experience at the lodge was almost a culture shock from what I had been doing and living up until then. Working in the villages and travelling with the people of South Africa had been my life and now I was in a luxurious hotel room, surrounded by people from all over the world, and being taken care of felt so odd, especially after seeing the despair in the village that I had been working in with Mary. However, it was a nice vacation and escape for my last week in South Africa before arriving back home. It was especially great to see all the animals, because when I originally left for South Africa I thought that I would be coming across them in the street on my way to work, I quickly learned that you would need to go to a game park to be able to do that, and so in my last few weeks between Kruger and the Game Drive I was able to finally see the animals that I thought I would be seeing all along.
On the day that it was time to leave Mary and her sister brought me to the airport to say goodbye. Not ready to leave the country that I had fallen in love with yet, and still feeling the need to work in the village that I had start the after school work in, I cried when it was time to go through the security. Mary and I held on to each other for a long time to say goodbye, feeling it hard to say goodbye to what had become my best friend, and a person that I felt I had known in another life. It was with this hard goodbye that I left my home in Limpopo Province and started my journey home, it was a long and hard trip, but now I am back home and trying to get ready to start the new school year.
