When It All Comes to An End

Today is Friday, November 18th, 2011, and it has been exactly 11 weeks since I first came to Lima; and tonight I leave. While I´m beyond excited to go back to see my family, at the same time I am also really sad to leave the environment in which I feel I grew so much as an individual these past 2.5 months. I´ll miss the Cross Cultural Solutions volunteer house, filled with its warm, friendly staff and the laughter of my fellow volunteers. I´ll miss Fe y Alegria #17, my teaching routine, and having the girls bombard me with relationship questions at random intervals of time. I feel like both my home and work atmosphere made my time here as amazing as it was. Since I was here for so long, I had the liberty of seeing 4 different volunteer groups come and go, and it was interesting to see how to the house-dynamic changed with each group. There were two people I really bonded with though, Mark and Meghan, who were from the 3rd group with whom I spent the most amount of time with. Anyone who knows me well knows how much I love laughing, and these two brought out the best of my humor that had unfortunately been lying a bit dormant for some months now, and for that I will be forever thankful. I came to Lima thinking that I had to be serious for the majority of the time, since volunteer work by nature should be somber, right? Wrong. The laughter that I shared with my housemates when I wasn´t working transferred into my teaching routine, as I became more animated and took myself less seriously in the classroom (something that I think really helped get my teaching points across to the girls and the boys). All in all, I never thought I would have as much fun as I did here in Lima, but I did. Laughter transcends cultures and boundaries, and all the fun I had made me concentrate more on living in the moment instead of worrying about homesickness. That´s probably also why I was so serious and tense the beginning of my trip, since I thought that in a few weeks time from the start-date of my program I would be heart-achingly homesick, yet that never actually happened. I´m still kind of scared that it will happen with my next adventure, but for now, I´m so grateful I had all the experiences that I had here in Lima. The people here, the Limenos I mean, are one of a kind people. They´re so open, sweet, and easygoing, and I will never forget the amazing teachers and the curious students that I met at Fe y Alegria, nor the people that I met out and about the city. I know that anytime I come back to Lima I´d have at least 10 places to stay, and that sense of hospitality, radiating from these peoples, really touched me. Thank you Lima, you will forever remain in my heart as a beautiful, eclectic city that rendered me a young adult, instead of merely a teenager.