Most of this post was written one year ago as I left Kyrgyzstan.

We touched down in Istanbul at about 9:30, and we all moved quickly to security, visas, and customs. One by one, as we cleared, each person, without realizing it, left our group, and I watched over my shoulder as the old man in the kalpak got his passport stamped and went off to his next destination.  I was alone, without anyone from Kyrgyzstan, for the first time in months, surrounded by travelers from all seven continents.

It’s weird to be transiting Istanbul without leaving the airport and without knowing when I’ll next be passing through.  In my two years in Kyrgyzstan, I spent more time in Istanbul than any other airport in the world except Bishkek and Osh, at some of the highest highs and lowest lows in my service.  And at that moment I was at one of the higher highs, excited for everything that would be coming next, beginning with two months in Buenos Aires, a Fulbright in London, and finally an MPA at Princeton.

My flight from Bishkek to Istanbul also had the peculiar distinction of showing me a place I was always curious about: the Aral Sea.  Turkish Airlines flights from Bishkek to Istanbul follow an ever-changing routing based on which countries have the cheapest airspace to transit. Sometimes, it’s Russia, but sometimes we follow a weird zigzag across Azerbaijan and Georgia.  Sometimes, we go right through Uzbekistan.  But that day, we flew in such a way that we *just* avoided the northernmost point in Uzbekistan.  Which meant that we flew directly across the northern part of the Aral Sea, with the right side of the plane seeing the remains of the Uzbekistani side and the left side seeing the slowly recovering Kazakhstani side.  It was pretty cool.

But most of all, what I wanted to do on that first flight, and on the two that followed was to sleep.  For these two years have been some of the most difficult of my life.

I joined the Peace Corps partially because it seemed like a very good fit professionally, but also because I was having trouble finding an international development job in the United States (part of a ripple effect of the 2008 economic crisis in the US, everyone went and got masters’ degrees and started applying for the same positions I was applying for as a newly minted undergrad).  Peace Corps was a good way to work hard and gain experience that would serve me well.

I did work hard, and the experience I gained will certainly serve me well.  But the challenges that I did end up facing were unexpected and harsh.  Peace Corps sends most people to site without goals, structure, or a scope of work, which is great in some communities and not so great in others.  I was told to “go do health things,” and assigned a counterpart that they had not investigated and who turned out to be disinterested and abusive (I was able to change counterparts after she was transferred to a different office).  There were frequent systemic problems with the office and a frustrating level of opacity of operations that ultimately led me to feel very ignored and misled by the organization.

My biggest critique remains that it needs to be volunteer-first.  But, one of the biggest reasons it can’t be volunteer first is that so many volunteers choose to violate policies, misbehave, harass, and abuse other volunteers and staff.  I discussed this with several PC staff, and the office has no choice but to behave in an extremely paternalistic manner because of how egregiously a certain number of volunteers behaved.  I personally was the victim of considerable rumors and harassment by other volunteers from very early in my service, harassment that would have gotten those volunteers fired in any HR office in the United States.  If I have any advice for volunteers in the future, it’s to please behave, for the sake of your colleagues.

So yes, as I settled into my flight from Istanbul to San Francisco, I was not only exhausted from being awake for 30 hours straight, from long-winded goodbyes at the office and coffee-shops and some unexpected drinks and dancing shortly before getting into my taxi to the airport at 2 in the morning.  I was exhausted from EVERYTHING.  And this flight, the holes punched in my ID card, my passport canceled, my residence permit returned to the Ministry, this was my freedom from all of that.  It was a very tangible signifier that I overcame the challenges that I faced.  But it also sadly reminded me that I was leaving Kyrgyzstan, a country that I still love with all my heart to this day.

I always try to stay awake for the first two hours of a flight.  I have my routine – I watch a movie, eat dinner with a glass of wine, and have two Nyquil pills before putting in earplugs, pulling on an eyemask, and sleeping the rest of the way to the destination.  The 13-hour flight to San Francisco was no exception to this, and I actually managed to sleep for nearly the entire flight, thankfully.  And unlike my previous two trips to the United States, this time I was welcomed by the sight of the Pacific Ocean for the first time in over two years, the ocean that raised me from the time I was a small child.

I was only to be in San Francisco for 7 hours, but that didn’t stop a good friend from showing up at the airport and taking me out to dinner in the Mission for my first meal on the West Coast in over two years.  And after less than two more hours in the air, I finally landed in Seattle, where my mom was waiting for me at 1am at the baggage claim, 33 hours after taking off from Bishkek.  We took my bags and carried them out to the car, and for a moment it felt like it was only yesterday that she had dropped me off at the same airport with the same bags to set off on this whirlwind adventure.

When we got home, I sat down in my room and took off my kalpak, which I had been wearing since landing in Seattle.  I looked at it, one of the first gifts I received from my first host family in Chui after arriving in Kyrgyzstan.  But rather than set it on my shelf to always see, I carefully folded it into a flat shape and slipped it into my backpack.  I know I’ll need it somewhere in the future.