These last few weeks have been a doozey. Well, let’s not play it down. These last few weeks have constituted as some of the worst days of my life. The kind of bad days you never forget. The kind of bad days that has your friends nicknaming you “slim” when they see you at In Service Training, and keep your eyes accessorized with some ever fashionable dark rings.

I should probably explain for those of you who didn’t catch it, that I got published in a Rwandan propaganda article. The reporter took many of the words I had posted in my blog and used them out of context to support whatever it was he was trying to say at the time. I had to delete my blog and ran into some trouble with administration. The good news is they didn't fire me. When I thought all of it was over and I had pulled through all of the worst parts of the month, I got sick. Really sick. I rolled up to Gisenyi with a fever that topped out at 102 degrees. Thank god I was staying at a really nice hotel with all the normal Western amenities one could ask for.

We kept the fever down with Tylenol and I got better for the most part… But then things at home started to fall apart. “It’s hard to invest your emotions in a Ghost,” he told me. Maybe if I were the cool crime-fighting, gun-slinging variety he wouldn’t have left me. But that’s neither here nor there, because the fact of the matter is all of these things happened, and for a while I couldn’t breathe, and for a while it felt like I might drown. Eventually it occurred to me that regardless of how I felt, minutes, hours, and whole days were still passing. My environment was still the same. My friends were still the same. This country was still the same. The only thing that had changed was the way I felt at that very moment. The only thing that had stopped moving was me.

I still don’t think I’ve started moving again. I feel like I’ve been hit by a mac truck after all of this and I’m more like twitching road kill than something that moves with the ebb and flow of the world. But I’ll get there. I’m still resolved not to leave Rwanda. After everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve done, it’s going to take the end of the world to take me away from here. While I’ll admit, sometimes it feels like the end of the world, I know better. I just have to give it time. One day not too far away all of this is going to make sense to me.

So... I have a new blog. Hopefully I can keep this one as far away from things like Peace Corps Journals and the Administration as humanly possible. More on all of that later. My site is still wonderful and I am preparing to depart to In Service Training in just a few days. This totally works for me because I am due for a bit of a vacation. I think a little tanning by the lake is just what the doctor ordered.

Cheers.