Leaving on a jet plane...I WILL be back again!

So this is it- my final blog entry. It has been a bittersweet feeling over the past 12 hours to think about going home. Last night we invited all of the people who made this trip possible over for one last meal. It was a great time, but everyone had an empty happiness about them. It is great to celebrate our time with the people close to us, but that meant that the time is over. We had a group of students from Yale at our Braai last night. They are interning with Interstudy this summer, and being that we are all "Minnesota nice" we said the more the merrier. Part of me was jealous of the fact that they were only beginning their adventure here. They still have the rest of the summer.

I'm sitting in the family room as I write this. The room we spent our first night in. A room that holds a lot of laughs, blogging, and good conversation. It really is the room of a family.

I have been looking back on my very first blog trying to figure out exactly what it is I learned while I was in South Africa. In a way I don't know if I will ever understand it all, but it was interesting to look back. I was so nervous for so many things but so excited at the same time. In a way all of those fears came true, and now I'm sitting here writing with even more fear about coming home. I'm scared that I'm different that what you are all going to expect. I'm afraid that I won't respond how you all want me to, and that my relationships will change because of this experience. I'm afraid to leave my safe little bubble that exists here and go back on my own to my own piece of the world. I'm afraid to re-evaluate my life and what is going to come of all of that.

I have been trying to put my finger on everything that South Africa has given me. I was looking at my journal this morning. This is something that wrote one morning during my stay in the Gugulethu. (It's my journal, so its a pretty big deal that I'm sharing this with the world.) What have I gotten from South Africa? I think that, for the past couple of years I have known who I am not, but I haven't knonw a lot about who I am. That's fine. I think that it's good to question. It's good to get confused. To sit at a crossroads, and look back on your last 18 years and wonder if that's a product of your surroundings or if it's actually you. I think that it's good to sit with that and be uncomfortable with that and to question that. South Africa has given me a better understanding of who I AM and who I want to be. Did I need to come all the way to South Africa to find that? No- I probably could've come to that conclusion in mly own backyard. But I didn't find it there. If we all stay within our own little confined borders what do we learn? We are coexisting within one larger world, and if we never learn to leave our little confines are we truly coexisting at all? It's like what Rev Spiwo was saying when you have to learn to walk with the dwarfs to create the giants, but you also have to be okay with walking with the giants and you have to be willing wot walk in the middle as well.

I think that all too often we define who are by what we do, what we are going to school for? Does that actually accurately define us? I think that's why I have been feeling so lost lately. I don't have my roadmap or plan. I am lost in a vocational path, but does that mean that I have lost my identity? Maybe I need to figure out who I am before I can figure out what I want to do. I think that my education had it a little backwards in that way. What would the world look like through those eyes?

It's weird to think that there was a "before South Africa" me and and "after South Africa" me, and that they can be any different at all. It's weird to think about the moments that have changed me in a split second. In that moment I know that I can never quite return to what I was before whether I want to or not. So am I really come home and going back to life as it was before? I hope not. If I can honestly come back to Minneapolis and forget about everything that I've experienced here- if I come back and don't want to do anything- then I missed something somewhere along the line.

So this concludes my final word-vomit blog entry. You will hear no more from me. I thank you all for reading, commenting, and caring about my travels. I can't wait to sit down and tell you all of the stories that I have. Please don't hesitate to call me up or come and visit me. I would love to talk about my trip. It helps me keep it alive in my head and it helps me process it all. I'll see you on the other side of the pond! And with that, there's only one question left to ask...

...World Cup 2010 anyone???

Cheers :)