bye bye!

Cue the music. A fat lady? A funeral durst? That circus jingle that I hear in my head nearly every day? Nah. We'll go with an accordion. Cue "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" on the world's most out of place instrument.

It's down to leaving. Or returning? Of course it's both, but they imply two very different things. 'Leaving' seems as though it's sad or some sort of ending; 'returning' has more of a positive, pick-up-where-I-left-off sort of feel. Which category I place myself in depends heavily on the day I'm having: have I just returned from a great hike or taken a cold bucket bath? Are the women working away at the wool and mohair or did some guy just ask me for sex? All I know is that goodbyes have been really tough. The day I arrived in Ramabanta I brought snow with me (hence one of my names in Sesotho: 'mother of snow'); the morning I woke up to leave for the last time, I looked out to see snow on the mountains marking my farewell.

There's all these awful, blase phrases running through my brain about my experiences here. 'Life-changing', 'eye-opening', 'tough', 'beautiful'... I've spent two years writing letters and composing blogs by candle light for the world to read and I can't seem to come up with anything better for my finale. All these scattered, unorganized thoughts and feelings that I want to try to explain. I am so thankful that I've lived and worked in Lesotho (please, PLEASE if you love me at all, pronounce it correctly when we talk about it: "leh-soo-too"). Nothing will ever compare to the enormous challenge of trying to (and once in a while succeeding in) work here. My heart has broken along with my patience. I've crawled into my bed under a holey mosquito net at mid-day to escape the place I willingly crossed an ocean to call home. And I've let the shout of a toddler calling my name from across the village bring me back from that defeat. (I'm really not the same person I was 2 years ago, am I?)

The end (or denouement, thank you GRE) is meant to have finality and resolution. Tragedy, comedy, drama, thriller, or silly musical? We've go all the elements here in a tangled mess of a story. A three letter plague devastating the nation; a typical outfit of pink shorts, a 50 cent t-shirt and a cat hat worn by a taxi driver; a single mother barely putting her 2 daughters through school; dogs that laze around during the day and turn to packs of monsters at night; and a couple dancing the tango to an accordion. So does Casey come out of the mountain kingdom victorious or defeated? I'm not one for admitting defeat but I'd be a liar if I said I conquered PC, Lesotho, Ramabanta, or Fatima Mission. Lesotho ("leh-soo-too") hasn't really felt my presence - I've made no earth-shattering, newsworthy changes - but I've certainly felt Lesotho leave it's mark. Not just the scar on my leg from the run-in with an over-filled dump truck, either.

Not a single 60 seconds here has been easy. Maybe that's why a place that's made me twitch with anger is suddenly so hard to leave. When will a day of washing my underwear, baking bread and weeding my garden ever be so rewarding? My life comes down to a very basic existence. It's more than the lists and tallies I've kept, though I'm sure they say a good piece about my time here: 126 books read, 145 letters written, 6 flat tires, an unknown amount of miles hiked in/around Ramabanta, plus two years of journal entries, rides hitched with friendly strangers, hikes for a cell phone signal, skirts, and "give me sweets!" from little snots who know better. No, the truth, the summary of the final act is really just this: Lesotho has taught me to love two places, each with it's own set of qualities. Here, I've learned to live in each moment. It's a cliche, I know, but how else do I describe sitting on my porch with a cup of tea to watch the mountains go from green to purple to gray at sunset? The sharp smell of tomato plants on my hands as I pick the fruit for dinner? Visiting the women spinning wool and mohair just to sit and listen to the wheels oscillating, the carding cloth pull, the chatter of their voices? A thousand things I never really knew before Lesotho. And here I realized how much I love my home. My parent's house, perched next to the wood stove, Lake Michigan, the color of maple trees in the fall... trees in general, come to think of it.

"Find one word or phrase that describes Lesotho, Casey." First, find such a description for your home - something you'd tell someone who's never been there. Then, imagine your home has babies running around unsupervised without pants on, men who wear women's clothes (well) and think nothing of it, and women who wear dresses from material that looks like 20's wallpaper when they want to get decked out. It's never quiet but always peaceful. If you say "strange" it sounds like you don't really love it. If you say "beautiful" it seems dull. "Poor" is true, but not all of the story. "Absurd"? "Farcical"? "An impossible place"? Lesotho ("leh-soo-too") is a harsh, impossible place; absurd to a beautiful degree, senseless in it's intense extremes. Snowy mountains in Africa, a culture that is embarrassed at the sight of women's' thighs in pants but devastated by a disease passed during sex. It's a place of one culture, one way for doing any task, but has embraced Beyonce and Obama, shiny high heels and umbrellas with a passion. How do you not fall in love with that? How can you not look forward to leaving? And how do you explain why it's somehow such a magical, absurdly, senselessly, wonderful place?

I've called two places "home" in my life and both offer the sound of rain on a metal roof. Yet neither place has a permanent pull for me. So this is a story that ends as the heroine walks off (or maybe rides away on a donkey) to wander elsewhere. She's changed some, more she's learned about who she really is, and come to know two places infinitely more. Dim the lights (snuff candles). Cue orchestra (low, off-key wail on an accordion). Casey/Mosa bows out (two years in a skirt doesn't mean I've found the coordination to curtsy).