Well here I am. At the end of the road. Well, maybe not a road, more like a long twisting side street of my life filled with bizarre experiences, unique people, and the rather vivid memories that include goat slaughtering and 1 liter of water showers. I arrived in Praia today, the capital city where I will conclude all my Peace Corps business and be on my marry way. Of course I could not have said my final goodbye to the Cape Verdean people without a truly Cape Verdean experience: as many of you know, my landlady is completely crazy. Well, maybe I haven't mentioned this before, but she literally is completely crazy. She spends most of her time in Italy leaving her niece to take care of her apartment building and clothing store underneath. Those were the salad days. Well, unfortunately, she has been back in good ol' Sao Vicente now for about a month and a completely harassing, unreasonable individual. Peace Corps always pays their rent, they rarely have problems with landlords of any kind that I have ever heard of. But she has been claiming to high holy heaven that Peace Corps has been cheating her out of her rent and that she will take them to the newspapers if she has to! Well today concluded the scene with some truly spectacular yelling on both my and her parts in the middle of the road. I had to catch my flight at 12:00 and she was refusing to let me leave! She wouldn't take the keys from me, until she had confirmed with everyone she could that the rent had been paid. She wanted to drive around to her bank, wait there, call her financial person, who conveniently happened to be in the hospital for some sort of finger cut and so on. She yelled to me in the middle of the street that she was a victim in all this and that PC was going to cheat her out of her money! (By the way, Peace Corps of course has copies of all the receipts from deposits and transfers and so on). So I asked her if she wanted me to leave the keys outside the door when I left, if that would be better. She screamed that she was going to the bank and if the deposit hadn't shown up she was going straight to the newspaper to report PC and their awful, cheating ways. Oh brother. Anyway, I'm done with all that. I think it shows how much I've grown simply by the fact that I didn't cry and sit on the stoop in the fetal position.

So here I am, the last leg of my journey and it's like all events in our lives that come to an end. It feels like merely a blip on the radar. But when I stop and think, and examine myself I see that it has had a profound effect on my life and way of thinking. I would like to think that I have had a similar effect on some of the people here, but I cannot be sure. The world is changing so fast for the people here and they're catching up at record speed. Today on my flight, I saw a Cape Verdean man with an iPhone. It's incredible how much things have changed here even in the past two years.

This is experience is something I can't really sum up in words. I hope my blogs have been sufficient to share with you all a glimpse of my experiences, but I know that when I get back to the States, that I will still get pressed for the 6 second sum up of "So, how was it?" Well, it was fine. We all have forms and states of being, and for most volunteers, living here or any other country is simply another state of being. It's harder sometimes, sure. But human beings adapt at extraordinary rates and to adapt to different environments is practically what we were born to do. I loved my time here and no, it was not all easy, and of course having no water isn't ideal. But I didn't quit, which means I proved 100% of the people I know wrong. But it also means that if I can do it, anyone can. And volunteering isn't something that has to be done on a global scale. It can be a simple thing you do locally, but it's more often than not quite rewarding. Ok, I've had my PC poster-child spiel.

But I also want to thank everyone who supported me throughout this whole experience. It was often very comforting to know that people were interested in what I was doing and wanted to read about what I had to say. And of course a very special thank you to everyone who sent me packages and goodies. You have no idea how much easier life becomes with a simple little Ziplock bag :). Honestly, I cannot express my gratitude, and I hope that my blogs and photos were sufficient enough to provide you with a decent understanding of my life. Sometimes it's nice to live vicariously.

So I sign off from my blog, and sit in Praia for the next week, and then it's a nice little vacation in London after that. And then home. Finally.

So, I have a small observation to make about this country. Probably one of the last observations I will make. But it's something that strikes me as interesting simply because it's so purely cultural as to be quite unique I think. I was invited out by my adult English students to have a drink and perhaps a slice of pizza. My class decided that they wanted to meet outside of school at a place where we all could 'hang out.' At least that's what I understood to be the general consensus as it usually is with these social events. There were only 5 students in the class, so including me, we were only 6. An adequate size for an amiable group of people to simply hang out. But this term 'hang out' doesn't really exist here. The place they chose to go was loud and full of large tvs playing DVDs of live concerts by musicians, most of whom I had never heard of. So we sat, and drank Cokes and ate pizza and.....watched tv? I don't have a tv in my house, as I feel that it is not worth spending the money to watch three channel, one of which shows soccer 24/7. No thanks. But to socialize here is something entirely different then what I was used to in America. I can't imagine a group of my friends or my family going out to a restaurant and just sit there watching TV. We interact, we discuss, we talk and laugh and joke. Right? I mean, there are the exceptions, such as if we go specifically to a sports bar to watch a huge championship or something. But I don't remember CPK, or PF Changs having big screen tvs with music videos blasting. But it's even on a smaller scale. Nilton and I went over to his friend's house on Saturday night, because it was his friend's birthday. His friend's girlfriend was also there, so it was a nice group of the four of us. But right when we got there, he proceeded to turn on the TV and insert one of those famous music video DVDs and blast it. We could hardly hear each other. And for me, the foreigner, hearing the language properly is crucial in understanding what the heck someone is trying to say to you. So needless to say I simply kept my mouth shut most of the time, which is a shame, because wasn't the point of that situation to talk and socialize?

So that got me to thinking. What exactly is there to socialize about here? This is a small country and almost nothing on a grand scale ever happens here. If you think about the things you talk about with your family and friends in a social setting, almost none of those things exist here on a grand scale. Apple isn't releasing the new iPod or iPhone here, and there are no competitors trying to take over the cell phone market. There is not a huge world-changing presidential election here (although the last election here in May was very exciting, I doubt it was a blip on anyone's radar) that may effect the pitiful American economy or the global view of Americans. Cape Verde isn't making headways in the campaign for off-shore drilling, or saving the environment. The college I teach at isn't packed with Emo students drinking their way through 8am Intro classes. There just aren't these grand 'events' that unite the people here. They have nothing to discuss. I don't mean this to sound as though these people are just floating around living their lives, but in a way they are. Which is probably a good part of the reason why I'm here. But the population here is soooo small, under 500,000 people, that things are done one a much smaller scale. There are only so many people who work in the government and only so many people who work at a university, or a bank. Everyone knows everyone else, at least on each island. Just think about this: my first island, Boa Vista had a population of just over 4,000 people; the university I will attend next year has 10 times that amount of people in their undergraduate population, almost the exact number of people who live on my current island. Again, I stress that ASU, alone, has the same number of people as the island I currently live on and I live in the second largest city in the country. So I hope you can imagine what socializing here is, or is not.

Now, I'm definitely not saying that when my friends in America and I get together we discuss the geo-political ramifications of the Nintento Wii. I'm simply saying that we talk, comfortably about existence in general, an existence that seems to be so much richer with sensory overload that the only thing we can do is spit it all out when we interact. Here it's not like that. There is almost a complete lack of sensory input which therefor requires an additional buffer when you are in a social situation (enter the live concerts on DVD).

Anyway, that was my observation. In other news, my mother comes to visit me on Saturday, yay!!! And I leave this country in 37 days. Woohoo!!