GRE, GER & COS

Life in Peace Corps is filled with acronyms, and this week was nothing less. Saturday I woke up bright and early to take the GRE at Addis Ababa University. Sunday I participated in the Great Ethiopian Run along with 35,000 other people. And finally the past few days have been spent at one of the finest resorts in Ethiopia at my group’s Close-of-Service conference. A weekend I anticipated and looked forward to as a test of both mind and body followed by a week of relaxing, and almost all went as expected, a rarity here!

This great weekend I had anticipated for several months turned into a weekend I was dreading last week because I felt unprepared.  I had hardly studied for the exam and only ran twice since back at Ethiopian altitude. Test of mind and body? I feared failure at both. All I can say in hindsight is that I finished both, and I’m proud of it! The exam went well, although it will be a while to find out the results, as Ethiopia is one of the few testing centers in the world that still uses paper tests. The run was a bit rough, but I’m grateful for fellow PCV and neighbor Emily who stuck with me the whole time, and proud to say I didn’t walk a step.  That’s a hard thing to accomplish in a crowd of 35,000 people! The run was unlike anything I could quite imagine; a sea of unattractive yellow and green tshirts all heading in the same direction. Being surrounded by a crowd of thousands of Ethiopian is a legitimate nightmare of mine, but thankfully this day the focus was not on me.

The feeling of accomplishment an hour and nineteen minutes later was unmatched. And the feeling of camaraderie with the fellow racers kept all of us smiling for the whole day as we passed each other in the streets.  The scene was chaos, and yet it worked in a uniquely Ethiopian way. A hole in the road big enough to swallow a racer was simply blocked by some kid standing in front of it. The walkers, well, they walked in the middle of the road, of course, and you just had to find a side path to pass them. At one point kids chased after me yelling for me to give them my bottle of water (this happens all the time in Ethiopia, but come on, I am running!). An old lady dressed in traditional clothes decided to cross the road during the run, and no one stopped her. And one of my favorite things I overheard was an Ethiopian couple running and one said to the other, in Amharic, “There is no winner.” Exactly.

The day after the run the 28 volunteers remaining from my group were relaxing at Kuriftu, a fabulous resort an hour south of Addis. I had no complaints as I was having a manicure, pedicure and massage! We all had a wonderful last Peace Corps conference together, learning about how to adjust back to America after life in Ethiopia and spending time all together for the last time on PC’s dime! COSing (Closing Service) happens over a two or three month period, because we all will have medical exams and plenty of administrative paperwork, so only about five volunteers can leave in any given week. We all applied for COS dates and depending on availability were given the date we wanted, or something close to it. Two of my friends, Danielle and Kyle, and I will COS on January 13, 2010, officially two years, one month and eleven days after leaving home.

Volunteers start leaving in just about a week from now, so the goodbyes were definitely becoming reality. After our getaway to Kuriftu, we arrived back in Addis on Thanksgiving Day, and we had planned a special dinner together at the Sheraton buffet! I’m not sure why it took me so long to go eat at the Sheraton buffet, well, maybe because it costs about seven days salary to eat that one meal, but it was worth every dime. I’ve never had sushi at my Thanksgiving dinner before, but I could seriously get use to it.  After we were all stuffed to the brim, we rolled ourselves out of the fancy hotel and back to our semi-regular hot shower hotel and said some heartfelt goodbyes.  It’s hard to believe that I won’t see these people for a really long time, and it’s even harder to imagine trying to recognize all of them with access to hair straightens, real make up and maybe even exposed shoulders! Let the nostalgia begin…