I have been in Malawi for a bit over two weeks, and I leave two weeks today. I am already feeling quite melancholy about leaving... Somehow whenever I leave a place, I never, ever fully believe that I'll be back again. Perhaps that comes with having moved 15 times and having gone to 10 different schools by the time I graduated high school. Living the gypsy lifestyle (to an extent - I was a preacher's kid) shaped my personality from a formative age. This has privileged me to a degree, as I've eased fairly easily into the "world citizen" lifestyle in the past couple of years. And yet I long for the roots I wonder if I'll ever have.
Balaka has become a certain kind of home to me, even though I've only ever spent a total of three months here. I have built a certain type of community here, and a good foundation of local relationships for working within this culture and this town. Every time I've come I've built it up by by bit, and then I leave it again. Each time I wonder what will be left standing when I return.
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