Finishing My Peace Corps Service

I am amazed, the time has come for me to ship off back to the Great American Frontier to face the challenge of figuring out how to get someone to pay me to do work I am passionate about.

I know that my blogging has always been erratic, but I am warning you that from this point forward it will most definitely be even more so. The reason is that on December 15th I will officially cease to be a Peace Corps Volunteer. On the 16th I am flying to Ethiopia to experience that for a little more than two weeks. Then a day after flying back to Nairobi I am headed to Tanzania to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro (1 week) and then lay on the beaches of Zanzibar for a few days. From there I am rushing to western Kenya to meet up with another returned PCV to visit Uganda, Rwanda, and maybe the DRC for about 15 days.

That bring me to February 3rd, which is when my dad is coming to visit. Him and I will be visiting my school and surrounding area, then are headed to Lamu, the most beautiful Swahili city intact in Kenya. After that I will be visiting a friend in Western Kenya until I fly out for good on March 8th.

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There are so many things that I am leaving behind. I don't intend to suggest that passion fruit plants are at the top of the list of things I will miss, but I took a picture of them that I like the other day and thought I would include a little about them because I don't think people in the US have seen them.

I planted these four vines in the summer of 2009. They were so fragile and vulnerable that I had to enclose them in sticks to keep chickens from eating them and the dogs from sitting on them.
Now they are so massive that they have grown all the way up to the peak of my roof and half way down the other side. They flowered about two months ago, at the start of the rainy season, and now have lots of fruits. Only a few of them are currently ripe enough to eat, but the next PCV in the house will eat so many he will get sick of them.

Below is a picture I took of one of the flowers. The spherical fruit emerges from center, as the flower simultaneously wilts and falls out.