Goodbyes

One week after Deb and Zack left, Clement and I tearfully escorted Dana and MacPharlen to the airport. Dana and Mac have been wonderful friends to the two of us pretty much since I arrived in the country. Dana completed two tours with Peace Corps here and in the meantime met MacPharlen. They married two years ago and as she boarded the plane to return "home" she was weeks away from completing her seventh year in Malawi.

Most recently Dana worked for Jesuit Refugee Services as the education coordinator on the refugee camp in Dowa. There are two small camps in Malawi mostly housing Rwandans, Burundians, and Congolese. Dowa is the larger of the camps, inhabited by close to 4,000 refugees. In addition to overseeing the schools on the camp, Dana and her Malawian counterpart began an anti-human trafficking campaign as well as a campaign to register all unaccompanied minors.

Human trafficking is an enormous global problem and unsurprisingly most of those trafficked are children and uneducated women from low-income countries, who are either sold by their own families or persuaded by lies of a better life. The networks are incredibly, someone can disappear from Malawi today and then arrive in a brothel in Europe months later. Most people in the developing world never receive a birth certificate, or only receive them with an explicit request and a lot of footwork. To be a bit dramatic this means there is essentially no record of the existence millions of people. The lack of a central registry in turn makes it more difficult to advocate for and rescue trafficked people. Although clearly passionate about her students and teachers, Dana found her calling in the anti-trafficking work. Last fall she applied to schools, this month she will begin a social work program at Case Western and hopes to also get her law degree there.

MacPharlen is an electrical engineer; very warm and hardworking. Escom is the only power company in Malawi and for the past seven years Mac has essentially been responsible for the section of the company serving the entire central region of Malawi. Up until last month he had never traveled outside the country and although he was excited by the possibility of continuing his education he always seemed a bit nervous when I asked him how he felt about leaving. In truth he was leaving his life. Dana frequently joked that it was his turn to learn about her culture although I imagined she was almost as nervous to see the evolution of "her culture" since her last trip home.

Over the past year and a half Dana and I spent countless hours talking about home; feeding each other bits of our histories, frantically trying to catch up on everything that transpired in all the years we were strangers. Of course we also spent hours talking about our relationships, the good and the frustrating, and laughing frequently. I know Clement and Mac also appreciated the links between the four of us. Truly over our short time together our relationship became like family.

On August third I felt excited but anxious for the two of them, entering and re-entering an unknown world; leaving all the connections of home. As I watched their tiny figures wave and board the plane through my tears I realized all my sadness came from their departure and concern for them and none from being left. For now, Malawi is home.