so homesick

Usually I am fine with being in New York. Okay, the noise makes me crazy and I am completely confused by the fact that no one seems to be able to turn their vehicles off even if they will be idling for an hour, but there are enough parts I love to offset the irritation. But today I made the mistake of watching my screensaver pictures for a while. Really watching them. I watched Eugene's little daughter laughing in her mother's arms. I watched Gemma and the guide and I smiling at the top of Bisoke. I watched Beatrice and her women's association working on a steep hill in front of the stunning green patchwork mountains. I watched a boy on the dock in front of the Golf Eden Roc with my house and the ARC house and Bethanie in the background. And I am so so homesick. What is it that they say about the first place you work?

In college, I was obsessed with Liberia. And I'm glad to be going back there this summer, but Rwanda was MY home, my house, my independence. Being a student, having no money, and living in the land of concrete, although I want to learn this stuff and I value this education, really sucks in comparison. Frankly, part of it is just that I miss being treated like an adult. All of this herding into classrooms and getting emails about when you can register for classes and being told that you must update your computer with exam software by a certain date under pain of lots of horrible things and being summoned to mandatory meetings for summer grants where they tell you nothing for an hour is just getting intolerable. Okay, one can argue that life in the real world is similar but it isn't. The summons to meet with the prefet were just not the same. I just can't bring myself to CARE that much about the exam software. I cannot express how glad I am to have committed, even before arriving, to going away each summer. New York in August... eeeee. Law firms in New York... eeeee. Even worse.

End of whining post.