Home, almost

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It has been almost exactly a month since I arrived back from my volunteering post, and I have been reluctant, or not found the time, energy or right thinking space to post about my homecoming. I am not sure why. I think perhaps I have been very future focused with finding a job (no luck yet), and also have yet to move back into my own place – I’m currently staying with a friend until mid-May. So I have not had the right time and space to think things through, unlike when I was in placement, living alone, when I had plenty of quiet space to think.

I looked back at the previous post but one, at the re-entry ‘curve’ and stages from a volunteering manual, and I think I am just beginning to get the inklings of the beginning of the pining phase, having gone through the initial euphoria at being back home. It was a high, landing at Heathrow at 5.30am on a brilliantly sunny day with the temperature at 3 degrees C, in a light cotton frock, having lost my coat somewhere on the way to the airport. The following days were sunny, and everywhere the first signs of spring could be seen. Ghana has no seasons as such, it is just more or less hot and rainy, and I had missed the distinctness of seasonal climate patterns. I was glad to have missed the winter though.

It was uplifting to see the green shoots of trees and plants, the early season wildflowers, and ecstatic to hear the familiar birdsong of blackbirds, robins, and to see the first skylark. Then there were the family reunions with my gorgeous grandson, son, and mother, and my dog, which had undergone emergency cancer surgery just before my return (successful, though with cancer you can never tell if it will appear again). Now I am working furiously on my allotment (a rented parcel of land where I grow fruits, vegetables and flowers) to cultivate, sow and plant the new season’s produce. I walk miles as I sold my car before leaving, which is doing great things for my fitness levels.

Browsing my photographs, I found some taken in the last few days of my placement, never posted here, which made me feel regrets for having to leave my West African life, and my friends and colleagues there. I feel sad even writing this part. So I think perhaps the pining stage is beginning, for the wonderful, happy life I left behind. It was one of the happiest years of my life, and had a truly restorative effect on my health (i.e. the symptoms of my long-term illness, fibromyalgia), and other aspects of my well being. I was able to resolve the deep grieving process I was going through for the loss of my father in 2012. I was able to reassess my priorities for the last years of my working life.

Packing up your life and going volunteering is both challenging and empowering. You strip away all the habits, behaviour patterns, and relationships of your home life. You have to live, cope and thrive in a completely new situation, with new places, people, and cultural behaviours. It is empowering to realise that, despite illness and bereavement, I was more than able to rise to the challenges. When all that was familiar was stripped away, and I was alone with myself in a new situation, I found I was happy just being myself. I found that I was not weighed down by a lot of emotional or psychological ‘baggage’. To find that out about yourself is both liberating and empowering. I hope it lasts, and is not drowned out as I am reabsorbed into life at home. I do know that I will put my happiness and well being first more often in life than I used to.

I intend to keep this blog going for a few weeks at least, to post about life as a returning volunteer, and recollections and insights into the experience, and of the project I was working on. I have a lot to say about that, reprising thoughts expressed in a previous post “Can global corporations ‘do’ international development?’. I have much to think about and share. I do know one thing for sure, which is that had it not been for my 89yr old mother, and my about to be 5yrs grandson, I would not have come back. I would have applied for another posting and just carried on volunteering. I don’t care if I never have another job again, and would happily volunteer until I really am too old to continue. One of the things that my professional partners said before I left was that I had ‘the spirit of volunteerism’ in abundant amount. I will do it again at the first opportunity, but for now my priority is to be there as much as I can for Mum, for as long as it takes. She is in fine form for a woman of her age, but I noticed the difference a year has made in her form, which has become more frail.

I also brought home a whole case full of wonderful Ghanaian cloth, which I intend to use for making up some prototype designs and commissions for wonderful frocks, with an eye to the possibility to setting up a small business that I can continue into my retirement. Gardening, dressmaking, being with family and friends…who needs a job? Well, sadly I do, as I still am paying off a mortgage on my small but lovely new build ‘eco’ flat.

The photos this time are a selection of the last days of my time in West Africa, and some of life since my return.  What a contrast! But being the happy person I discovered myself to be, it is the positives that I dwell on rather than the negatives.  Having said that the amount of complete rubbish on TV is staggering (I have not owned one for some years), and the tendency of my fellow citizens to whinge and moan and get short tempered and arsy in public is something of a reverse culture shock.  I’d rather listen to the birdsong and enjoy the flowers, and feel happy and grateful for my life.  Volunteering and Ghanaian culture taught me something of fundamental importance about a good life, which I hope I never lose sight of.