Saying Goodbye Is Hard To Do

After our party we had a busy last day at site. We said goodbye to our friendlies who came to the party. My girls had their community teaching after Camp GLOW. That was a pretty big deal. They taught for like two and a half hours and they did amazing. They taught another session the next day, after I was gone.

And then they all exchanged pictures from the party and followed me to our wat (buddhist temple). We finally had to say goodbye for real.

I went home and we made sure everything was packed up and we had dinner with our host family. Our host mom had made some of our favorites. MMM she can make some good chicken.

Then we gave out the last of our gifts to our host family. To my host brother we gave him DVDs of cartoons we thought he'd like. I told him he needed to listen to them to help learn more English. To my host sister and host mom I gave makeup and nail polish, and to the family we gave them pictures we took with them over our time there. They really got a kick out of looking at the pictures. Then we surprised them with some of our Cambodian Wedding photos they didn't know we had taken.

I was real sly and asked my host sister to do my nails one last time..with her new nail polish, that I had just given her, real sly. She happily obliged, and after arguing with my host mom over the most beautiful color combination, I ended up with the most fabulous Khmer nails I could have asked for. Colored tips, glitter, and stickers? What more could a girl ask for?

 It was great hanging out with just our host family for one last night. Just the 5 of us as it was most of the time. We were off to bed for our last night in the village. I don't think either of us slept really well that night, we were too full of nervous energy.

 We were up bright and early the next morning with the taxi there to take us away from what had been our home for what seemed like a lifetime, but in fact was only 10 months. Our one toothed Yay came to say goodbye to us. She is just the quintessential Khmer grandmother and I liked her so much. I finally got her to smile and show a bit of that one tooth, the way we recognized her when we first moved there.

Our host sister came with us for the trip to Phnom Penh. She had only been there once, when she was a little girl. She had just graduated and was off to the big city. I thought it was pretty cool that our host parents trusted us enough to bring her down there, and make sure she got there safely.

Our last goodbyes were to the volunteers who came to Phnom Penh to say goodbye to us. It takes a few days to process you when you choose to leave Peace Corps, so we had two nights to visit our favorite restaurants, stock up on the last things we wanted to bring back, and to see the sweet volunteers who came to see us off.

While it was so hard to say goodbye to all of our family and friends, it was probably the most hard to say goodbye to Cambodia. Really, to say goodbye to the experience of Peace Corps and living in Cambodia. It just wiggled it's way into our hearts, and I wasn't quite ready to say goodbye yet. So instead I said I'll see you again.