With the end of the GHC fellowship looming large on the horizon, I find myself thinking about the way that it began. I still remember the first time my cofellow and I drove through a river and up a mountain to our placement site at Partners in Health in Neno, Malawi. We drove past the market, the hospital, and the little staff houses all in a row and pulled up to a house on a hill with a beautiful mountain view. The first few months were tough, but even then I knew it was going to be an amazing year. Shortly after we arrived, I wrote the following in an unfinished blog post:
“One of my favorite moments at my placement is the drive to the Mozambique border to buy fuel. We leave the PIH office, sitting 3 across in a beat up pickup truck with large empty barrels in back, and start down the long dirt road to the nearest gas station, about 1 ½ hours away. The drive is hot and bumpy, the truck is crowded, and the radio doesn’t work. It is hardly a luxurious experience, and yet I look forward to it every week, because it is one of the few times I get to fully experience the beauty of the place I live. From the seat by the window, I look out on the mountains which characterize my home: the fields newly planted with corn, the houses where women sell mangoes and charcoal and children wave at passing cars. There is so much about Neno that makes life difficult for the people who live here, and those things cannot be forgotten. But every time we reach the top of a hill and I see the road stretching away through the mountains, I feel with perfect conviction that I am exactly where I belong.”
Almost a year later, I still feel deeply connected to this place. But now the fellowship is ending, and like so many other fellows, I am faced with the task of saying goodbye. It is difficult to think about life in Neno going on without me – my bedroom occupied by a stranger; the work that I love so much being done by someone else. But I take solace in the fact that, in little ways and big ones, my co-fellow and I are leaving our new home just a little bit better than we found it. Life will go on without us, but what happened this year will not cease to matter. The new fellows will build on what we have done and make it their own, just as we did with the fellows before us. And I will move on to something new, knowing that by leaving I create the space for a new fellow to find her own sense of belonging; to do amazing work and to become part of the movement we are trying to build.
At its heart, GHC is about creating a community of people across geographic and cultural boundaries who want to help each other improve the places that we love. Through this fellowship year I have become connected to activists from all over the world, and that connection means that I have a responsibility to the work that they do and the people and places they love. It also means that when I can’t be in one of my homes, I know that there are amazing, inspiring fellows still there doing the work that needs to be done. Now, as I leave one home and return to another, I thank GHC for letting me be part of this community. And I know that if I ever make it back to Malawi, I will have friends waiting for me there. So tionana, Malawi. Until we meet again.