Two Hundred and Thirteen Seconds

I thought this video would be a lot longer.

I recorded one second of every day of my Peace Corps service. I enjoyed the discipline of capturing one brief moment each day: whether it was something exciting or something banal, after a while I found that a one second video was a one second video and that all of the moments mattered. I could write a long blog post about how my whole experience was made up of precious moments, moments that passed too quickly, moments shared with so many special, important people—but I won’t write that post. I’ve already written that post a dozen times on this blog. I’ll let this video stand on its own, as its own thing, a thing without very many words, but a thing full of many dear memories. And a thing with an abrupt ending.

What Happened, Part Three

Best to start with part one, and then part two.

* * * * * *

Thursday, March 19

I woke up early and finished my DOS before going to breakfast. I had gotten stuck trying to write a section on VAC, knowing it needed to be in there—I didn’t have any secondary projects, but VAC took up a lot of my time. I finally wrote something and met everyone for breakfast.

The office was packed. A bus was arriving at 10:30 to take our cohort to the other hotel, so we needed to finish everything on our COS checklist, pack, and check out of the hotel before the bus left. Moz 30 and 31 were leaving the next morning, so they were also jammed into the tiny hallways of the office trying to finish everything. I sat on the landing of the stairs between the second and the third floor typing away at my site report. I added phone numbers of my school director and the police chief and listed the fruit trees in my yard and offered suggestions on what time was best to get in and out of the city. I penned loving descriptions of the movers and shakers and important people in my community: Tio Jacob and Tio João and the Chefe de Posto and Padre Fernando and Kátia and Professora Melina and Domingos and Valdim and his son Kevin. The last question asked for a piece of advice, or something we wish we’d known back when we were trainees first reading about our future sites. I wanted to write something long and profound, but I knew there was just no time. I had to be done already. I wrote:

There are so many “if only I’d known back thens,” but also so very few. The process of growth and discovery is what makes Peace Corps service at some points so frustrating and at all times so, so rewarding.

Things move slowly, and that’s okay. You will be annoyed with things out of your control and things within your control, and that’s okay. You’ll be very good at some things and you’ll be very bad at others, and that’s okay. You’ll wish you were better, and eventually, you will be.

Be present in every moment. Appreciate the silly jokes little kids share with you, and appreciate the stars at night. Lean into what challenges you. You will never fully integrate, you’ll never be a perfect teacher or youth group leader, and you’ll never make matapa as good as your mãe. But keep on trying, everyday. The effort you put in is what it’s all about.

Maggie walked up the stairs to ask how I was doing at one point. “I’m okay, I just can’t stop crying,” I said. She sat down next to me and held my shoulder as I kept typing through my tears. Everything was horrible all the time, but everyone kept checking in on one another in their quick moments of strength. It’s the only way we got through this week.

I finally finished. I walked up to Sérgio’s office and sat down across from his desk. We read through my DOS and he checked that I’d completed the site report. He asked about the things in my house and we had that whole conversation. I gave him my keys.

He said he was just as shocked as we were that all of this was happening. But he was so hopeful we’d be back. This would end, and we’d come back, and it would be okay. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t say that. I started to thank him for everything. He said to stop, that he’d still see me the next few days, and that I should go help people get to the hotel before we both just sat there crying. He signed my COS checklist. I was done.

I walked downstairs and handed the checklist to Mary Jayne. I did it. My service was officially over, and I was a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. I was done.

I felt relieved and I felt terrible.

Walking down the stairs to Mary Jayne’s office, I figured I should take a photo because I wasn’t sure I’d receive a copy of this dumb piece of paper. Mary Jayne had accidentally signed off at the bottom on Wednesday night before she realized I hadn't finished my Programming tasks. I waited to sign in her office.

While I was crying and typing on the steps earlier, Julia and Jonė and I were figuring out the bus to the hotel situation—very few people would be ready to go by 10:30, so we got it pushed back to 11:30. We had people stuck at the office communicate with their hotel roommates to get their bags down to the bus and check out. Once the bus arrived, it became clear there would not be room for both people and bags. Everyone who was there filed on with as much stuff as they could fit and then left the rest behind.

The full bus passed me as I was heading back to the hotel just before noon. Samara and Maggie and Cole and Julia and I stood with everyone’s luggage until the bus returned. It was sunny and warm. We waited about an hour.

After filling the back with our cohort’s luggage, there was still room for the five of us in the front of the bus.

We all ordered food on Maputo’s one food delivery app on the bus ride across the city. I brought my bags up to my new room with Alicia. I ate lunch in Cat and Maggie’s room and then Cat and I took a long nap on their beds. We went downstairs to the bar adjacent to the lobby and sat at a table playing games with Kevin and Noah and Kathryn and Moz 30’s Brittney and Alyssa for a few hours. Someone pointed out how pretty the giant statue of Samora Machel, Mozambique’s first president and greatest national hero, looked as the sun quietly set behind him. We all paused to turn and watch the sunset for a few moments, only somewhat surprised to learn that even the statues were making us cry now.

Cat does her best impression of the iconic statue that sits atop a large hill in the center of Maputo. The first time we came to the city with Nércio, I took a photo where Cat also did her best impression of the iconic statue.

This day was a strange transitional day. We were in a new place, we were with all of the other PCVs in country, and we were done with our paperwork. There was nothing to do but be together and be sad together and be a little crazy together.

The night turned into a strange...party(?) at the hotel pool. There was lots of drinking and crying and pizza and singing and dancing and swimming and at one point I watched two people play chess on a lawn chair for an hour. Emotions were high, everything was weird, and around 1am I decided I’d had enough social interaction for the day and wanted to sleep. Tomorrow will be very hard, I thought to myself, something I had thought to myself every single night this week.

We had put out the call for someone in our cohort to speak at the COS ceremony the next morning, and, understandably, no one wanted to. What was there to say? Very late Thursday night, Ted texted me asking if he could do it. “You'd be perfect,” I said in reply. We had all voted Ted to be our speaker at swear-in back in the fall, and he was fantastic. It made sense that it should be him.

Friday, March 20

I got down to breakfast early. Mary Jayne needed VAC to collect a document everyone in our cohort had, because Migrations was requesting it back before they handed over our passports. I got a cup of tea and settled into a spot at a big round table. I stayed as different groups came and went and collected as many documents as I could. I handed over the stack to Julia and went upstairs to get ready for the COS ceremony.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of this ceremony. No one was; Lindsay led it but was sort of making it up as she went. It was optional but almost everyone showed up, most of us dressed up in capulana outfits. Our colorful clothes were so happy and bright and that it almost felt joyful. But also so, so deeply sad. The act of dressing up in our nicest clothes to attend a final ceremony we were all dreading sort of felt like a mix of going to a good friend’s wedding that was also a good friend’s funeral, but also it was all of our own funerals. I know that’s a dark, confusing metaphor. But it was traumatic and lovely and devastatingly beautiful.

Lindsay handed over the floor to Ramiro, who made us laugh, and Sérgio, who made us cry, and a few other staff members who made us miss them already. Ted got up and gave a beautiful, powerful speech about how despite the failings of the systems that lead us, we must still live lives dedicated to service. A few people from the other cohorts spoke, and then more people felt moved to stand up and speak. Elo and Noah and Hannah L. from our group shared some beautiful words. Naomi and Eugenio from Moz 31 sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and everybody in the room wept at how painfully the lyrics dug straight into our hearts. I’ll never hear that song the same way again.

Hannah L. speaks about the value of the relationships we’ve built through our shared experiences.

As we wrapped up, Lindsay shared a few announcements: they’d gotten transportation to the airport for everyone, and Moz 30 and 31 would need to leave within the hour, and also, Moz 32’s travel plans had changed and we’d be leaving Saturday morning instead of Sunday afternoon, but she didn’t have any further details than that. Oh. We took a giant group photo and drank coffee and ate little snacks.

Moz 30, 31, and 32 all in the same room for the first and last time.

Lindsay gave Jonė and me our cohort’s letters that we wrote to ourselves at the end of training. I think we were supposed to get them back in May at our reconnect conference, or maybe next January at mid-service. But we were getting them back now instead. I ran around the room trying to get everyone their letters. If I couldn’t find someone I’d give their letter to someone who I knew would see them in the next few hours. I remembered back to the first few days of orientation when I was worried I’d never learn everyone’s name in our cohort.

I waited until I got all the way home to open my letter. There were enough emotions flying around in those last few days, and I didn’t need to bring my past emotions into the mix. I hadn’t remembered at all what I said in my letter, and I was very surprised reading it. So much had changed, but in some ways, it seemed that very little had. I’ve put literally every other detail on here, so, why not, here’s my letter:

For reference, I picked up my old annoying habit of biting my fingernails at some point in the fall. I was so disappointed in myself, but saw it for what it was: for the first time in many years, I was experiencing some of the most stressful days of my life. Once I got to site, everything was much more relaxed and I focused my energy on quitting that habit, and I did. Then—and I’m not sure if you’ve heard—things got a bit stressful again, and unfortunately I’m back biting my nails again.

We took one last Tom e Jerry photo.

Just behind us is the Catholic Cathedral, and in the distance is the Catembe Bridge and Cat’s favorite statue of Samora Machel.

Jú, my host sister from Namaacha, called me asking where I was. Oh, I never called my pai back. Shoot. I started to explain that I was in Maputo, that I would be leaving the next morning it looked like, but she interrupted me. “No, where are you? Are you upstairs?” I ran downstairs and found Rachel, the Moz 31 volunteer who lived with my homestay family before me, looking around the parking lot. We spotted Jú at the same time and had a long group hug. We chatted for a bit, and then Rachel had to run up to grab her bags to make the bus. I brought Jú up to where we were drinking coffee and eating little snacks.

Over the balcony we could see all of Moz 30 and 31 starting to assemble outside, so we headed downstairs to see them off. A lot of our cohort had 30ers or 31ers as sitemates (meaning they both lived and worked in the same town), so they had grown very close. It was nice to finally put faces to the names I’d heard about from friends, and oh so sad to watch them all say goodbye to each other. As Jú and I stood together chatting, she called our mãe and pai so that I could say goodbye. I talked to them each for a while, then Jú hugged Rachel and me again and then left—she was teaching a class across town and had to get going.

It occurred to me as I spoke to Jú that I had changed a lot since I’d last seen her. I knew that I had grown a lot in training when I was living with her, but until I was standing across from her months later, speaking very good Portuguese, it hadn’t hit me that I’d probably grown even more at site than I did in training. I used to see Jú every single day; she was synonymous with who I was in Mozambique. But suddenly she was someone I used to know a very long time ago. Those last few days, all we could focus on was how little time we had ultimately spent in Mozambique, but in that moment, it felt like I’d lived multiple lifetimes there.

Rachel and I smushing petite Jú with our love.

I stood next to Noah and Kevin and Sérgio as the bus pulled away with the two health cohorts. We waved. It suddenly got very real; they were leaving the country in a few hours. And apparently so were we, the following morning. All of staff who’d been there for the COS ceremony piled into a van to head back to the Peace Corps office. Sérgio said he’d be back in the morning.

I walked back in the lobby and saw Cole, Rachel, Maggie, and Cooper J. looking like they were headed on an adventure. “Where are you going?” I asked, and didn’t wait to hear the response. “Can I come with you?” I said immediately. I ran upstairs and quickly changed and grabbed my purse.

We set out on what was, indeed, an adventure: in the midst of the worst week of my life I had one of the better afternoons of my life. Armed with deep friendship, expired documentation, and literally our entire Mozambican bank accounts in cash, we took a deep breath and just started walking, leaving the sadness that filled the halls of the hotel behind us. The sun was shining. We had no idea how, but we were leaving Mozambique in 24 hours. We had 24 hours left in our home, in the place where we’d met, in the place where we’d become friends. They’d need to count.

We walked to the central market and bought our favorite fruits and cashews and a few little trinkets. We made our way over to a series of capulana stores and spent over an hour sifting through stacks and stacks of the waxy, colorful material, consulting with each other on which would serve as the prettiest tablecloth for Maggie’s family dining room and which would make the nicest matching shirts for Cole’s mom and dad and sister. We each bought a few different patterns and returned to the warm streets of Maputo’s bustling Baixa neighborhood where we immediately spotted a man selling côco lanho. We lined up to request one coconut each and watched as he hacked away at the outer layers, revealing a not too sweet and slightly salty, juicy, chewy inside. My first and last côco lanho, just in time.

One fruit stand inside Maputo's central market.

Capulana.

Maggie: in capulana, with capulana.

Cole had an abundance of côco lanho at his site up north, so he showed us the ropes of how to buy and consume the large, fun snack.

Rachel and me with fruit and capulana spilling out of our hands.

The côco lanho gentleman hacking away at a côco.

We found a spot of shade on the sidewalk and listed off the nearby restaurants that we knew as options for lunch. The appeal of eating out in Maputo was the international variety, but nothing about that felt quite right. “I really want xima,” Maggie said. I knew of one place where Tio João and Dúlia had taken me in January, but it was small and hit or miss with its non-meat selection. Cooper suggested we ask someone, looking at the row of women along the sidewalk selling fruits and vegetables and clothes and books. He and I marched up to two women and I declared, “Hello, my friends and I want to eat Mozambican food.” I followed that up with, “Where should we go?” Besides the fact that I was speaking Portuguese, it probably appeared as if I had lived in Mozambique for less than one hour. The women pointed to a few street vendors nearby, but Cooper clarified, “We want to sit down. Is there a restaurant in this area?” The two women conferred with one another, and then gave us the following instructions:

Walk straight along this sidewalk, and cross at the big intersection.
On the corner, you’ll see a large sign that says “PEP.”
Look for an employee by the entrance to the store under that sign and tell him you need to find Dona Lulu.
He’ll take you into a nearby door and up a staircase, and on the right, you’ll find the food you’re looking for.
They have tables.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. This is the only thing we wanted in the entire world.

We went to the PEP sign, asked the first guy we saw if he knew a Dona Lulu, and he nodded and told us to follow him. He brought us to the staircase, just as the women had said, and told us to enjoy. We thanked him. “Bring me something back when you’re done!” he said, laughing.

Rachel impressed everyone—but especially Dona Lulu—with her Changana mastery, and we were welcomed with open arms. A table was cleared as a singular, handwritten menu was produced from in back, and we proceeded to enjoy one of the more delicious and special meals of our lives as we looked out on Maputo below from this small, magical restaurant hidden away on a strange old balcony.

Making our way upstairs.

When we reached the top we weren’t sure of where to look, but we headed outside and turned right and found the place.

We were so happy during this meal. It had been a while since we felt happy. “Sarah, are we living a blog post right now?” Cole asked at one point. We were. 

Maggie got her xima wish, and I ate a fish eyeball for the first time because nothing mattered anymore. The eyeball was weird. But the rest of this fish was some of the best ever.

While we were eating, Emily sent a link to news article in our cohort’s group chat with the giant words, “Mozambique closes schools, suspends visa issuance” in the headline. Whoa.

Although no cases of the respiratory disease COVID-19 have yet been detected in Mozambique, the government has decided to step up its preventative measures, notably by shutting down all of the country’s schools.

Addressing the nation on television and radio on Friday afternoon, President Filipe Nyusi said all schools, whether publicly or privately owned, and teaching all levels of education, from pre-school up to university, must close for 30 days as from next Monday.  . . .

Nyusi said the government will ban the issuing of entry visas, and cancel visas that have already been issued.

Whoa.

We agreed that this was good news; preventative measures were good, certainly. And this alleviated some of the guilt of leaving behind our classes without a replacement teacher, because now our schools had at least a month to find someone new. That's better, right? The fact that suddenly schools were shutting down and all visas were being cancelled made the impossibility of our staying and the inevitability of our leaving all the more clear and blatant. It had to end. It had to. This wasn’t about us; it was so, so much bigger than us. And there was some comfort in framing the tragedy of it all that way.

(Comfort, of course, for us and us alone. My school did not have lights, let alone WiFi, and because they do not have textbooks, the notes that they copy down off the chalkboard are the only written school materials that students have. The conditions for “remote learning” absolutely do not exist in Mozambique, and schools closing for an extended period of time will likely cause most students to need to repeat their current grade if they choose to return to school after all of this is over. We looked to find comfort wherever we could, but the fact remains that we quickly left in the calm before the storm and the emotions we were feeling throughout that week were a messy mix of selfish sadness that our own dreams were being put on hold and a deep sense of preemptive survivors’ guilt as we started to comprehend just how bad everything was about to get.)

But, the food—the food was great.

We thanked Dona Lulu profusely for her hospitality, and she asked to take a photo with us. She told us to have a safe journey home and we made our way back down the long staircase to the street. Cooper dropped off a takeout order of grilled chicken and xima with the guy from PEP, who explained that he had only been kidding but happily took it anyway. We slowly made our way back to the hotel, winding through a pretty park and stopping to buy more souvenirs to bring home to family and friends.

A perfectly framed photo of us with Dona Lulu. 

Leaving the restaurant.

The next time I come to Maputo, I’m headed right for this secret staircase.

When we got back to the hotel, I started tearing apart my luggage to make room for the souvenirs I’d collected over the course of the week and organize what I was checking and what I was carrying on the plane. I also ran to a money exchange place to turn my last meticais into euros, saving just enough for dinner that night and a snack at the airport. (The place had run out of U.S. dollars after, let’s say, the 85th PCV went there ahead of me that week.) Before I knew it, it was time for dinner.

Rachel, Maggie, Cole, and I joined Cat, Cooper K., Julia, Lauren, Ted, and Daria for a trip to Maputo Waterfront, a nice restaurant right along the bay. A very similar group of us had gone to this restaurant the night before we left for our sites at the end of December. It’s our “last night in Maputo” place, I suppose.

As we were eating at around 8pm, an email from Mary Jayne hit all of our inboxes. Julia read us the breaking news: we were flying to Addis Ababa, Ethiopa on Saturday afternoon. There was not yet a connecting flight to the U.S., and we should be prepared to spend a night or two in Addis Ababa. Robert, our Country Desk Officer in D.C., would be communicating with us from here on out. Once we were out of Mozambique, our travel details were no longer in Mary Jayne’s hands. She asked us to send a quick email when we made it home, whenever that may be, so that everyone in the office knew we had arrived safely.

I was still riding the joy of the afternoon’s celebration of friendship, so instead of being stressed out with uncertainty, this news only made me laugh. I’d finally made it to the stage of grief where I was ready for anything: one last crazy, intercontinental adventure with all of my friends? Could be worse, probably. Sure.

Julia, left, is almost certainly just seeing Mary Jayne’s email in this photo.

Back at the hotel, Alicia and I stayed up repacking our bags so that we had enough clothes in our carry-ons to last us at least three nights, because we had no idea what this next leg of the trip would look like.

I finally finished around 1am and curled up in bed for my last night of sleep in Mozambique.

Saturday, March 21

Desk Officer Robert emailed us in the middle of the night to give an update: Peace Corps Washington had chartered an aircraft for evacuating Peace Corps Volunteers across Africa leaving Saturday night from Addis Ababa. We wouldn't be spending the night anywhere. We’d land in Ethiopia and get on this giant plane full of PCVs that was headed for D.C. We’d receive information on our domestic flights to our homes of record sometime over the course of the day, likely when we were in the air.

“Rest assured that the flight will not leave without you or your bags since it is chartered by the Peace Corps,” he said in closing. Interesting detail to include, I thought. I had no idea just how interesting this detail would read in a few days.

Alicia and I sighed reading his email at 7am and moved our extra clothes back into our checked luggage. After breakfast and a quick shower, I brought all of my bags down to the lobby.

The lobby was buzzing with anxious energy. We weren’t quite sad at this point: there wasn’t really anyone left to say goodbye to. For at least the next 24 hours, we’d all be together. We’d hit a wave of sad again when we got to Dulles, surely. In the meantime, there were just general travel nerves floating around the room.

Sérgio arrived along with the buses and helped us start loading our luggage. I gave him the board games that Ellen had given me Wednesday night. He threw them in the Peace Corps car and said he'd bring them back to the office for me. Julia and Jonė and I organized our documents from Migrations alphabetically. Lindsay and a Migrations representative would meet us at the airport and give us our passports in exchange for these documents. We loaded onto the buses. Sérgio kept getting a different number and asked me to double check his head count. I jumped between both buses and got a number that worked: 52. That was all of our cohort, in the end. (We’d be joined by four extra travelers from Moz 30 and 31 at the airport.)

Hannah C. blasted Mozambican music on her speaker for the duration of our bus ride to the airport. The drive was quicker than we expected. Our nerves heightened.

A few polaroids of our bus from Luciana.

We grabbed all of our luggage and headed inside.

Sérgio (white shirt, walking with a purpose) helps us unload our luggage.

I spotted Lindsay walking into the terminal a few minutes later. She was pushing a small suitcase. “Are you coming with us?” I said, laughing.

“No, I am,” a different voice said. She walked out from behind Lindsay pushing two larger suitcases. It was Ellen.

“Oh,” I said, and I stopped laughing.

The exchange went exactly like that, I swear. It was the most dramatic moment of my entire life.

It turns out Ellen was being evacuated, too. She found out Friday afternoon. Lindsay and Mary Jayne are the only other two Americans on staff, and they were staying.

After minimal last minute drama at check-in—someone from our cohort had fallen very sick and I was asked to calmly sneak with her to the bathroom to perform a malaria test before boarding (she didn't have malaria and is now fine), then we stood in a large circle as Lindsay called our names and a man from Mozambican Migrations handed us our passports—we checked our bags and then went upstairs to go through migrations and security. It occurred to me as I said obrigada to the ticket agent that I had just had my final Portuguese conversation for the foreseeable future. Oh well.

We got our passports stamped. That was over.

Before walking through security, I turned around and realized we were splitting from the last of staff now. Sérgio hadn’t come upstairs, and I hadn’t said goodbye to him. Lindsay and I made eye contact, maybe realizing at the same time that this was it.

Because of the responsibility thrown at us back in the fall, Julia and Jonė and I had spent many, many hours working very closely with Lindsay as we organized our extra weeks of training. We had already had one very inauspicious goodbye back in December: a few days before we received the documents that allowed us to stay in country and go to our sites, Lindsay went on leave in the U.S. We said goodbye to each other assuming we’d be sent home and we’d never see each other again. But then we did! We had a joyful reunion at the VAC conference in January. We reflected on how much had changed in a month, and how it was remarkable that we had gone from emotionally, stressfully saying goodbye in the midst of very strange and sad circumstances to having a regular old meeting like regular old PCVs. Then the next time we saw each other was Tuesday of this week. Back to very strange and sad circumstances, yet again.

I called Lindsay over and reminded her of all of this: strange and sad circumstances, then relaxing and nice circumstances, then strange and sad. “I guess that means the next time we see each other, it’ll be relaxing and nice,” I said. I thanked her for everything she’d done for us, and told her that I’d learned so much about leadership just from being around her. She said some kind things in return. “You guys have got it from here,” she called as she walked away. I turned around and pulled my laptop out of my bag and went through security.

Robert texted Julia and Jonė and me with a heads up: a PCV from Zambia had gotten separated from his group, and Robert wanted him to join us when we got to Ethiopia. Amazing.

We all walked to our gate, ate some food, and then at 2pm, we boarded.

And just like that, we left Mozambique.

I sat next to Maya for the six hour flight. The flight attendant said there were no vegetarian meals left when she got to our row, so the two of us ate little 1in x 1in side salads and a roll with butter and I tried to sleep a little bit.

It was late and dark when we landed in Addis Ababa. We were shuffled through some corridor to avoid going through migrations, because we obviously had no visas, but we also had no tickets for our next flight. Something like that. We emerged outside security and suddenly were surrounded by hundreds of people who looked like us: young Americans—with bags from REI on their backs, Birkenstocks on their feet, and big water bottles in their hands—who looked like they’d also just lived through a nightmare of a week. Peace Corps Tanzania, Peace Corps Rwanda, Cameroon, Madagascar, Malawi, Ethiopia—the list goes on and on. We were all there. We were all exhausted.

Moz 32 sits on the ground waiting for our tickets while hundreds of other PCVs go through security.

The five hours we spent in Ethiopia were stressful, but Hannah C. never stopped blasting Mozambican music from her speaker and that made it all a little better. Because our connecting flight hadn’t been official before we boarded in Maputo, our bags weren’t marked to make this connection. We collected our luggage tag receipts and handed them off to Ellen, who went with Levi and an airport representative to manually get all of our bags into the right place. There was some error with Ted’s bags, and I spent a few minutes frantically trying to call and text and email Ellen, but nothing went through. Ted and I gave up, and it all ended up being fine anyway. Against all odds, we found the random Zambia PCV. I realized I was extremely hungry and Cat and Lauren and I wandered until we found pizza. The pizza was terrible, but it was lunch and dinner.

We organized ourselves (geographically, by our sites) into groups of ten, and group by group handed over our passports to be checked in for our flight. For whatever reason, this took an extremely long time. The last few people to check in—which, because of our arbitrary organization, ended up being all people from the northern provinces—received standby tickets. This was confusing to us; how could there be standby on a chartered flight where we all had seats? Someone explained: our tickets were all economy class, so those who received “standby” would be getting on the plane, but they’d likely just be getting bumped up to first class at the gate. Lucky fools, we said, and then we hopped into the gigantic security line full of PCVs.

Ellen gives us an update of some sort. We’d clump up and yell whatever she said to the people behind us because it was impossible to hear anything in the crowded airport.

Hannah continued blasting music as we stood in line. Julia and Jonė and I were all fairly close to each other, and I had the thought that we should take a photo. We’d been through so much the past few months and weeks and hours, and we’d done it all together, as a team. The song changed and we all started dancing and I figured I shouldn’t interrupt a nice moment with my sudden sappiness. We could take a photo in Dulles. All airports look the same.

We got through security and Hannah kept the music loud and we kept dancing. The flight was supposed to leave just before 1am. We boarded around 1:45. The standby people stood off to the side as everyone filed onto the giant plane.

My last photo from the other side of the world. We were so relieved to finally be boarding, but we were also dreading the long flight ahead of us.

Sunday, March 22: In the Air

I slept for the first half hour of the flight. That was it.

Around two hours in, I got up to head to the bathroom. Someone from our cohort (for the life of me I cannot remember who—the details of how things played out on this flight are a little fuzzy because it was late and dark and we were in a weird, timeless, sleepy void) came up to me and said something to the effect of, “Hey, I’ve been walking around a lot. I don’t think Katie is on this plane.” This was a very confusing sentence. “Huh?” I said. “I don’t think Katie is on this plane. And not just Katie,” they continued. I continued to be confused. We conferred with some other people from our group. “Where’s Ellen?” someone asked. "Sean and Carolyn?" Huh. I started doing laps, noting everyone I saw and everyone I didn’t see. My heart started to sink as it hit me: oh my God, we are not all on this plane.

A group convened outside the bathroom. We tried to make a list. We tried to remember exactly who had a standby ticket. Who was in the north? Who would it be? Noah and Kevin were here, and they were in the north. Who was in that group? Who did we leave behind? Oh my God, who did we leave behind?

Veronica, another northern volunteer, appeared near the bathroom. “Veronica,” I said, “were you in the standby—”

“I was the last one on the plane,” she said. “Ellen yelled at me to run on the plane, and I did. I’m trying to remember who was left.”

We did some more walking and counting. “Sarah!” Molly called out to me as I passed her row. “Can you tell me if you see Saul?” I told her I’d let her know.

We came up with a final list of who wasn’t there: Saul, Katie, Julia, Sean, Carolyn, Nick, Kasandra, Arin, Zac, Hannah W. from Moz 30, and Ellen were not on the plane. Oh my God.

After five hours, we stopped for two hours in Lome, Togo. We waited on the tarmac as the flight crew switched out and we refueled.

We did a lot of socializing during these two hours. We mostly talked about how insane it was that everyone didn’t get on the plane. How did they run out of seats for a chartered flight? How is that possible? How would that group get back? Surely Peace Corps was on top of it and would get them on another flight. They’d be okay. But it left a sour taste in my mouth that we had been through every imaginable hurdle together over the course of seven months and for this very last leg of the journey, we weren’t all together. We’d stuck together through it all. We never split up. And a dumb thing split us up in the end. We’d all make it back to D.C. eventually. But it didn’t sit well.

It wasn’t until hour 10 of the flight that it occurred to me I’d never see most of those people ever again. By the time they got another flight to Dulles and made it back, we’d all be gone. That was it. No more being together. No goodbyes. Just a strange, dim ending.

Cat was worried I’d miss out on a plane meal and passed her little tabouli across a few rows of strangers to get it to me as lunch or dinner or something came around. (Apparently someone told the flight crew in Lome to load up on vegetarian meals because they probably had the greatest volume of vegetarians ever assembled on an aircraft, so I ended up being alright.) I befriended my seat mate, Phoebe, during that meal. She was a PCV in Malawi. We traded stories about our service, how we found out on Monday, and where were going next. She was quarantining with friends in New York. I was going to my mom’s house in Massachusetts. After that, for the both of us, who knows.

The stretch from Togo to Dulles was just over 12 hours. I drifted in and out of a nap for a little bit, but never really slept. I listened to some podcasts. I listened to some sad music. I felt sad. I didn’t have any strength left to cry. I did a crossword puzzle.

We were all chatty for the last few hours. We walked around and made ourselves tea in the back of the plane and passed out little bottles of wine at our leisure; the flight attendants gave us the run of the place. It was sort of a cool experience to be surrounded by hundreds of PCVs from all over Africa who’d just lived through their own version of this week; it’s always nice to feel less alone, I suppose, even if it is under the most insane circumstances in the world. Maybe especially so.

Our final descent was extremely bumpy. Looking across the plane out the window made me sick, because we were jostling all over the place and because I didn’t want to be looking out onto pine trees and neatly paved highways. I closed my eyes and held on as we bounced onto the ground. Nothing easy, right up until the last second.

Sunday, March 22: Back in the U.S.

We got off the plane around 2pm and immediately got on a shuttle to go through customs and meet our bags. We all scrambled to get on WiFi—our Mozambican SIM cards were useless now—and as soon as we did, we were flooded with messages from the group that got left behind.

“Obviously I did not get on the flight, because when do things ever really work out,” Julia had texted Jonė and me hours ago. “Anyways, you two are awesome and I hate that this robbed me of goodbye,” her lengthy message began. I was on American soil for less than ten minutes and was already crying.

I caught up on emails about my flight to Boston and the hotel in Virginia and a million other things that were communicated while we were in the air. I numbly made my way through customs. No one took my temperature or asked if I was sick.

We made our way to our baggage carousel and I found Jonė, who was thinking the same thing that I was. We went to the nearest desk and I gave a list of names to the man standing there. Everyone helped gather all of the luggage and assemble it in a big pile. Jonė called Robert as I explained the situation to the baggage man. I gave him Ellen’s contact information and Robert’s contact information and my contact information, just in case. We left.

Overly cheerful people from Peace Corps Headquarters met us outside baggage claim. There were balloons, which—I get the instinct, but it felt like poor taste. Someone handed me a packet on how to self-quarantine. I gave up trying to carry my large duffle bag and started dragging it on the ground behind me as I walked away.

Rachel and Maggie both had people picking them up from the airport and weren’t coming along with us to the hotel. I cried a lot saying goodbye to each of them, and I cried even more watching them say goodbye to each other.

For the thousandth time that week, I realized I was wrong for thinking maybe I’d finally gotten past the hardest part. It was still the hardest part. It was all the hardest part.

We got in a shuttle and went to a hotel. We each had separate rooms. No roommates. No gathering in groups larger than ten. There were a few fast food places nearby, but they were only open for takeout. “I think you’ll find that everything is a little strange here,” the hotel manager explained to us.

I dragged my bags to the end of an impossibly long hallway and dropped them at the end of my bed. The view from my room was a parking lot and an empty soccer field with small nets and perfect white lines.

I started crying. I took a long shower and cried. I changed into clean clothes and cried. Noah called asking if I wanted to get Chipotle. I went downstairs.

A big Chipotle group assembled. We decided it’d be best to order online and then walk to pick it up. Kevin and I ordered off of Noah’s phone, and a bunch of people ordered off of Cat’s. While the orders on Cat’s phone kept rolling in, Kevin and Noah and I decided to sneak off to pick up our food.

It was so, so cold. So unbelievably cold. I had found a pullover to wear outside, but I was still wearing sandals. I didn’t have shoes that closed. I wasn’t prepared to be in America. It was so cold.

A very American photo of Noah and Kevin walking down a sidewalk.

The Chipotle was great, of course, and it was especially great to share one last meal surrounded by so many of my favorite people. We were all flying out the next day, many of us around 8am, with a few people much earlier and a few people much later. We went to bed early because our bodies had no idea what time it was but knew we were exhausted beyond belief.

Cooper K. was getting on a very early flight the next morning, so Cat and Cole and I went to his room to say goodbye. We laid across the beds in his room and talked for a few minutes. We kept it short.

We left and walked towards the stairwell. Cole opened the door and the automatic lights flickered on and Cat said (maybe sincerely, maybe joking, no one will ever know), “Whoa—is it daytime?” And the three of us were bent over laughing until we cried. Pure joy. It was crushing, knowing it was all over.

I went back to my room and cried some more. I’d put off thinking about leaving all of my American friends until I absolutely had to. I didn’t have time to drag out thinking about leaving my Mozambican friends—I just left. But then I had a full week to fall in love with my cohort for the millionth time and remember how grateful I was for each and every person who made me laugh and made me think and made me stronger and kinder and changed the way I saw the world and so I sat in my big empty hotel room, more wiped out and more overwhelmed than I’d been all week, crying about everyone and everything.

I was in America. It was really over, all of it.

I put on a playlist of moody punk music and fell asleep.

Monday, March 23

Because I was on WiFi, Spotify didn’t just shut off when it reached the end of my playlist like it always did back at site. It kept playing moody punk music all through the night.

I slowly drifted out of sleep around 5am. “Future 86” by Bomb the Music Industry! was playing in my headphones—a sad, sad song that repeats the lyric, “I’ll probably never see your face again,” over and over and over—and I was crying before I opened my eyes. I did not know that was possible.

I showered and got dressed and dragged my bags down the absurdly long hallway to the elevator and dragged my bags to the lobby. It was 5:45. The lobby was packed.

I checked out and got my box of breakfast. I ate the muffin and saved my apple and orange juice for later.

My plan was to get on the 6:00 shuttle with a big group of people, Cat among them, and get to the airport early for my 8:25 flight. Everyone started putting their bags aboard and saying goodbye. Cole and Brendan, who had much later flights, came downstairs with Hannah B., my sole companion on our flight to Boston. (Julia and Sean and Carolyn should have been with us, too, but they were somewhere over the Atlantic.) I asked Hannah if she was going to leave, and told her I was heading out with the early crew on the 6:00 shuttle. “Sarah, that is insane,” she said. “There will be nobody in that airport. Let’s leave at 7.” I knew she was right. I grabbed onto Cat and we cried holding each other for a few minutes and then she and the big group quickly left.

Cat and I sat next to each other at Staging. We awkwardly shared the identity webs that the instructor told us to draw at one point. She seemed nice. That was all. Then as we boarded the flight to Johannesburg, a person I studied abroad with many years ago messaged me on Instagram to say that a girl she grew up with was also going to Mozambique with the Peace Corps, and who knows, maybe we’d cross paths. From the seat behind me, Cat read a very similar message and announced to absolutely no one, “Whoa! Sarah Smith! I think I met that girl yesterday!” I turned around to reintroduce myself. “You know Ashley?” she said. “Sort of?” I responded. We agreed that, well, yes, the world sure is small. I turned around, happy to have made the connection but unsure if our paths would cross much more than that. And then seven months later I was crying my eyes out at 6am in a random hotel in Virginia because I didn’t know when I’d next see Cat’s face and the thought of that shattered my heart beyond belief.

I hung out with Noah and Adriana and Hannah L. and Emily and we all did a crossword puzzle. As a cohort, we’d done hundreds of crossword puzzles together in training because seemingly everyone had the NYT Crossword app on their phone. This was the first one we ever did on paper.

Yelling crossword clues across a crowded lunch table at the Hub was standard procedure in training in Namaacha.

7:00 rolled around and everyone started crying again as the next wave started to leave. I cried saying goodbye to Noah. I cried saying goodbye to Cole. I cried saying goodbye to Brendan. I cried saying goodbye to everyone. Hannah and I finally pulled ourselves away and got on the shuttle with Cooper J., Adriana, and Maya.

Cooper, headed for the west coast, stuck with Hannah and I until we learned our gates were in very distant terminals. We said goodbye to him, cried a bunch, and got on a bus headed towards our gate.

As we crossed the wide tarmac, both of us still crying, Hannah suddenly grabbed my arm. “Look!” she said. A giant Ethiopian Airlines plane had just landed. Our friends were on it. They made it.

It was a thrill and a relief to look out into the dreary morning haze and know they’d made it back.

Hannah was right, of course. There was no one in the airport. It was eerie. We’d come home to America but it wasn’t the same America we’d left in August. Everything was surreal and empty and strange.

We boarded our flight with a handful of PCVs from Rwanda, a handful of random travelers, and no one else. There were 20 people on the plane at most.

Hannah and I cried for most of the flight and had a really, really nice heart to heart conversation in the middle of the short trip. A flight attendant interrupted at one point to give us a snack: Oreo thins. “Oh, yeah, that’ll do,” I said, laughing remembering the 10 pounds Isadora told me about. The flight attendant came back around and gave us all two more snacks because she felt bad for us. I didn’t want her pity but I took her Oreo thins.

From the last few minutes of a very, very long journey home: Hannah looks out over Boston as we land.

The flight was only an hour and a half. Because we’d spent upwards of 20 hours on planes the past two days, this was a breeze. We landed at Logan and felt the frigid air immediately.

“Are you going to hug your mom?” Hannah asked as we walked towards baggage claim. “I don’t know,” I said. We agreed that we probably shouldn’t hug our moms. We wanted to be strict about the whole quarantine thing.

We went down the last escalator and Hannah’s mom spotted us and waved. Hannah sighed, then started to cry. I joined her. I cried upon seeing a woman I’d never met. We both gave Hannah’s mom a big hug.

My mom arrived a few minutes later, and Hannah and I said goodbye and we went our separate ways. My mom told me a story about her friend Carol’s nephew as we got onto the highway and headed for Waltham. I fiddled with the radio and adjusted my face mask. I got home and said hello to my sister and met the two cats they’d gotten after I’d left, and I went into the living room and kicked off my shoes and dropped my bags and sat on the couch.

And that was it. I was home 20 months early. My time in the Peace Corps was absolutely, finally, definitively over.

That’s what happened.