We bought our
plane tickets back to the U.S.! The official date is May 20th. We’re still a few months out from leaving but
we found tickets at a good price so we bought them---ahhhh! Logistically, we planned on returning before
the toddler turns 2 – children under 2 fly free and the little one turns 2 on June 9th.
Most prices in early June were about $460, so out of curiosity, I started
checking prices for each date going backwards, and the magic happened on May
20th: one-way tickets at $285 each….with no layover!
This is the
miraculous part: there’s a direct flight from Punta Cana to Charlotte, NC. Here’s why it’s miraculous: We came here with 2 adults, 2 children, 9
pieces of luggage, 2 car seats, and a stroller. If there were layovers, we’d
have to collect all our luggage in the connecting city, get everybody and
everything through customs, and re-check it all for the next flight. What in the entire world would that have been
like? I don’t have to find out because we found a direct flight! Wepa! Now, we live in La Romana which is about an
hour away from Punta Cana, so we’ll have to get ourselves and our stuff to
Punta Cana in a rental car or something similar. But I’d much rather do that
than have two flights.
So, that’s
certainly a load off…but now I’m back at the itchy place – transition.
Emotionally, I’m everywhere. I’m happy to be heading back home. I’ve really
missed it. But I’m anxious about selling
all our stuff (again…including a car this time) and there are a lot of
uncertainties at this point (again) – my husband is looking for jobs so we’re
still not sure where we’ll be living yet.
You would think I’d be more used to uncertainty, or that maybe it would
bother me less…but I still hate it just as much as I did before!
Also, I’m sad to
leave my people here. I’ll miss them dearly. They’ve let me into their lives
and I feel an incredible responsibility to represent them accurately and
appropriately. I’m also sad because I
will leave knowing that most of them don’t get a “happily ever after”. And I
feel guilty because I am so ready to get back to my nice American life with its
poverty neatly sequestered “over there”. Life is hard for my respondents and
there doesn't seem to be much of a silver lining. I can escape back to my
American life, but they have no escape.
I can only hope I
do good work for them. As they say: Everything has a time and a season. It’s time for me to get ready to come home.
No comments:
Post a Comment