I have now been back in the states for two weeks, and though I have wanted to do my last blog post, I haven't quite been ready, and hadn't processed everything that I had gone through in the last four months to be able to say anything about it. But now, I am starting to adjust back to life here.
The first week back was extremely challenging. I had a much harder time adjusting to the time change than I did when I went to Madagascar, so I would end up falling asleep at 4 or 5 pm, and waking up around 1 or 2 am for breakfast. On top of the exhaustion, a lot of things were overwhelming for me. For instance, my first day back I wanted to go to Target to get sweatpants and a sweatshirt to curl up in as a security blanket/comfort thing, and after being in Target for about five minutes, I was overwhelmed and just wanted to leave. It was so much bigger than I had remembered, and I simply felt uncomfortable there.
For a while, I definitely felt like I was living in two worlds, and I found myself throwing French or Malagasy in my English sentences and having to correct myself because I wasn't making any sense. At this point, things are much better, but now I am afraid that I will forget the Malagasy that I learned, or the experiences that I had. It seems like it was so long ago, or like a dream, like something that never even happened at all, which honestly terrifies me because it was an amazing four months, and I don't ever want to forget a second of it. I learned an unbelievable amount and grew exponentially as a person, which is exactly what I hoped to get out of the experience.
I am lucky enough to still be in contact with some of my closest friends and family members back in Mada via phone and facebook, so I am extremely thankful for that. I talk to someone over the phone probably at least twice a week.
I definitely feel different after coming home, and realize things that I never did before about my own culture, myself as a person, and the world that I live in. I hope that one day I will be able to find the time and money to return to Madagascar. Perhaps it will be ten years from now when I have a family of my own and can introduce them to an incredible place that I fell in love with and got to be a part of for a semester.
For now, I will be working on my dad's farm for the summer, and August 15th, believe it or not, I will be studying abroad again, but this time I will be in Mongolia. I am extremely excited to go and hope that my experiences there will be as rewarding as my experiences in Madagascar. But for now, between me and Madagascar, it is most certainly not a "goodbye," but instead a "see you later."
