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.