Epilogue

A portrait of Kelsey and I in front of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Alexandria, VA.  Photo taken by Laura Daniels.

A fellow photographer (lower right) sets up a shot of the main square in St. Augustine, FL.

My father opens a present on Christmas morning.

Climate change demonstrators in Washington pound a rolling drum to protest the building of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Pastor Oran Warder interviews acclaimed radio host Diane Rehm at St. Paul's.

Written February 27, 2013

Berryville, VA

    You get back, you continue with your life.  

    Find a job, find an apartment, find stuff to do.

    Find a car.  Find new clothes.

    Find a partner.  Manambady hanao?  Tu es marié?  Are you married?: the Eternal Gasy Question...

    Well, I’m finished with some of those.  I have my wonderful girlfriend Kelsey, the one who waited so long for me.  

    I’m living at home, while I work as a substitute teacher at my old high school.

    I have dug out my old clothes, the ones I judged as not quite right for Madagascar.

    And mostly my stuff to do consists of looking for the job that will let me move forward from here.  I’m looking to follow my passion for journalism, but I guess one can’t be too selective in this economy.  There’s also nonprofit work and French translation.  I’ve considered investing in the equipment I’ll need for a small, perhaps mobile portrait studio.

    Once the job falls into place I’ll move to the DC area, or at least closer to it than I am now.  I’m looking forward to the fluid ease of public transportation, zipping around the city like I did in Paris.

    On the other hand, teaching high school has gotten me thinking about getting certified.  I use a rather strict classroom manner; since students usually try unashamedly to take advantage of substitutes, the alternative is chaos.  After a rocky start, most of the school knows me by reputation, and they know what to expect from me.

    And I discovered: I’m pretty good at this.  Once a class has been brought to order, once things are running smoothly, I can teach them most anything.  As a career I’d be in the best position to start teaching French, but at this point I feel like any subject, except advanced math, is within my grasp.

    In the background of the whole readjustment process has been a question: how do I get back to Africa?  Frankly, my desire to return has little to do with “helping the less fortunate--” I’m not Mother Teresa, and I don’t really wish to be.  It’s much more about living simply, one of the tenets of the Quaker doctrine I picked up at Guilford, and getting out of my comfort zone.  Both Niger and Madagascar forced me to adapt to situations, customs, and adversities that I had never experienced, and I overcame those obstacles.  I love that feeling of pushing my limits, of growing, of squaring up to challenges and emerging victorious.

    In Madagascar I once rode in a camion brousse for three days, packed so tightly that I couldn’t move my legs for most of the journey.  I vaccinated over a thousand of Manambaro’s children against polio in a single day.  I drove cows to till a rice field, and then gave a lecture on family planning while covered from head to foot in mud.  I went door-to-door in desert villages, gathering malaria statistics in a dialect I’d only learned a few weeks before.  I spent a morning interviewing the cake-sellers of Ampasia, jesting with them while graceless Belgian tourists stopped to stare at us like animals in a zoo.  I scaled mountains, harvested rice with a sickle, crossed streams barefoot, planted mango trees, taught my friends English, washed clothes by hand, and regularly biked 13 miles just to get Internet.

    So what if I was to get certified in TEFL, Teaching English as a Foreign Language?  Photojournalism will always be my first love, but TEFL would open doors that a camera and a laptop couldn’t.  I could live in francophone Africa and teach English for a living.  In anglophone Africa, I could teach French.

    Oh, Peace Corps, if you had made me an Education Volunteer, you could have saved me a lot of time.

    Whatever path I decide on, wherever that path might take me, a part of me will always remain in Madagascar.  

    I’ll close this blog with a quote from my friend Tom Leonard on the afternoon before we flew out of Niger.  Although he was just thinking out loud, I’ve always thought the words would make a poignant haiku:

No color in all the world

Like the bright emerald green

Of young rice stalks