I am BACK IN THE U.S. And, really, it would be difficult for me to be happier. Really difficult.

Why, you ask?

Well, in short, the Peace Corps wasn’t for me. I joined for selfish reasons and left for selfish reasons.

In long:

11 days ago, on Thursday, I hit bottom. I had only been at site for two weeks, had been unhappy since I arrived, and then, finally, for no apparent reason, I was tremendously sad all day. I randomly burst into tears a few times, and had no idea why. Everything around me seemed awful, I didn’t want to talk to anyone, my counterpart slighted me, the students took advantage of the fact that I didn’t know the rules, and I was just completely, absolutely, unhappy.

So, I called the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) and told her that I was clearly becoming depressed. She told me to plan a visit to a friend for the weekend and then report back on the following Monday. I called up my best-friend-from-training in Ngora and told her I needed a break, and planned to go over the next morning.

This was at about 4pm, and then I had 3 hours before it was too dark for me to be outside (I have to lock myself in at 7pm and can’t come back out until 6:30am), but I didn’t want to have to interact with anyone, so I locked myself in early and layed in bed thinking.

Eventually it got dark. I hadn’t been able to sleep, and spent my time mostly staring at the ceiling and reading a bit, while my mind was churning. I lit my kerosene lamp and laid back down. As the night wore on, and I thought more and more about the situation, I suddenly started thinking about the possibility of just leaving Peace Corps. I thought about it for hours, and was completely unable to sleep. Around 1am, I decided to go home. I still couldn’t sleep, but this time because I was excited, and so I re-lit my lamp and started packing up my things. I sorted out what I would leave behind (most of everything) and left only my mosquito net and bed sheet to pack after I permanently got out of bed. I got to sleep at around 3am, and got up at 5:3o.

While waiting for the sun to come up, I took my mosquito net down, bundled it up with the clothes I had bought in Uganda, and put it all in a bag for Johnny. Everything was ready to go. I packed a small weekend-bag with clothes and then hopped on a matatu to go to Kumi.

I met one of my friends there, and we chatted for a few hours about what I was thinking. To my surprise, she didn’t try to convince me out of it at all, and really seemed to support my thought process.

I then made my way to Ngora and met up with the PCV there. Again, she seemed completely unsurprised when I told her that I thought I was going to leave, and was nothing but supportive. Not a word to convince me otherwise. This was interesting to me, because I had left the option open of returning back to site, since I was expecting to hear all kinds of reasons that I should stay, and was even hoping that one of them would strike a chord and make me unmake my decision.

While walking into Ngora “town” to get some supplies, we got a text message telling us that another PCV from our training group was flying back home that night. I called him and asked what the story was, and how the process of ETing (Early Terminating) went. It sounded like he didn’t actually want to go, and that external factors from home forced him to, but either way the process had to start with the Country Director (CD). So I called up the CD and told him I was thinking of leaving. He asked me to come into Kampala on Monday morning and meet with him.

Over the weekend, my friends from Kumi and Ngora travelled with me down to Kampala. We stopped in Bukedea town (my site) and picked up all of my stuff on the way (two bags, my uke, and a bag of Peace Corps property). We changed taxis in Mbale and had a fairly peaceful, 4 hour ride into Kampala. Once there, I did a little souvenir shopping for the fam, and we met up with a few other PCVs who happened to be in town.

On Monday morning I went in to meet with the CD. I was actually looking forward to it, because I felt great about my decision and wasn’t afraid of confronting the guy who would be letting me go home. Plus, he had told me the previous Friday that, “My job in this scenario isn’t to convince you to stay, it’s to make sure you’re making the right decision for yourself.” It turns out that wasn’t really accurate, but that was what I was expecting when I came into his office.

We actually had a pretty nice chat, with both of us being blunt and honest, and with no confrontational, angry, or other negative moments. In general, the CD was disappointed with and confused by my decision, and thought that it was “very self-centered,” “quite immature,” “paradoxical,” and so on. Yeah, that sounds kind of offensive, but in the discussion it wasn’t. To each of his interpretations of why I was doing this (“rationalizing a set of negative emotions,” “quitting because it was too hard,” etc) I simply responded, honestly, that he might be right but, at least at the moment, I didn’t think that he was. This went on for about an hour, and eventually ended with his request that I give it another 24 hours, meet with my APCD and PCMO, and then come back to talk to him in the morning. I said sure, since I was in no hurry.

I then went to medical and chatted a bit, but they were, rightly, much more interested in my mental health than whether or not (or why) I was going to leave. This was followed by a visit to my APCD (in charge of Education). Now, this was the meeting that I actually wasn’t looking forward to. It wasn’t that I don’t like my APCD, I simply hadn’t built any kind of relationship with her and had some negative impressions due to some events during training (the way site assignments/announcements were handled, that she didn’t attend my Qualifying Project presentation (no admins did), and similar). Anyway, I explained to her that I wanted to leave and why, and she opined that it seemed what I really needed was a site change. This mostly stemmed from my explanation of that fact that I had no interest in my primary project (I’ll discuss my reasons for leaving later), but the APCD told me that I should have just asked for a different assignment. I responded that the only three assignments were Secondary Ed (what I was already doing), Primary Ed (every PCV I talked to who was doing this hated it), and Economic Development (probably the most interesting, but I have none of the prerequisite skills), and that I didn’t want to do any of those. She responded, “why didn’t you just say you wanted to teach at a University?”

…

“Uh, I hadn’t the slightest idea that that was an option. Plus, I don’t really have the necessary higher degrees.” Apparently, this didn’t matter and they were willing to make something work. Instead of finding this nice, I found it really annoying. Why the hell didn’t they tell us at the beginning that we had more options? And why weren’t we allowed to give more input about what we’d be doing? But I digress. I told her this would give me something to think about while I re-evaluated my decision until the next day.

To be Continued!