Five months have passed; five bunches of days, with experience for five long summers! And again I wonder, how will it be to come back home. Thank you Wordsworth for helping me to begin this blog article – the beginning is half of the whole. To be more accurate, I’m leaving in exactly three weeks from the day that I’m writing this article. When I’m quiet and alone, I already see the pictures of my return. How will I greet my friends, how will I organize my work, which presents I want to give to my family, how will I present my experience, will anyone understand me? And what is even harder, what will I have to leave behind, what if I will just forget or let go these feelings, these thoughts, these dynamics in me, that I have here. It’s hard to describe everything that is going on in my head right now. But a lot of issues seem frightening until you face them, so for the beginning it might be good to ask myself, what am I actually afraid to leave behind, to lose?
OK, there are “simple” things that seem obvious. First there is amazing Arab food that will never taste so good if I try to prepare it on my own and probably not even if I visit Egyptian restaurant we have in Ljubljana. And also to sit down and smoke shisha will not be the same. Another thing, of which the loss is not so difficult to understand, is the traffic. Goodbye to catching a bus wherever it passes by and farewell to this easiness with which we could stop a car at the end of the hike in the middle of nowhere and ask the driver to take us to the nearest place, where we can catch a bus. No more chats on the streets or in the coffee shops with strangers that want to welcome you and get to know more about who you are and where you are from. And one of the clearest “losses” that is simple only to understand, otherwise it is far from that term are all the friends I met here and all the free time available to me to hang out with them. It’s not an everyday thing to meet people that are so open, and so accepting, so warm-hearted. Thank you for that, if you are reading!
Then things get vaguer when I think about a tie to the culture. Most likely I won’t be able to follow that much what is going on in this (geographical) area any more. Neither when it comes to the political events nor will I be exposed to music, films, experience of the people and their situations, their stories. I will miss this diversity of Arab nations that one can witness here. Everybody has some relatives in Palestine or a family in Saudi Arabia or has lived in Emirates or… You can discuss the situation of different neighbouring and nearby states (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen etc.) with people who came from there and can tell you their own view on happenings in their home countrys. There won’t be so much of this coexistence of different Christian churches and a Muslim majority, from which I could learn a lot about the religious tolerance. I can’t even say tolerance, I’ve seen friendship, connectedness.
Right now when I’m writing there’s another field in my thoughts that is getting clearer. Somehow I feel like I don’t want yet to go back to where everything seems so usual. When I’m in a foreign country, everything seems to be new, and worth discovering. Going somewhere is not even a matter of consideration – why not – I’ve never been there, I want to see, I want to experience it even if it’s just a coffee place or a cultural center, a nearby village or a green valley. And learning is not demanding so much effort. With just hanging out with people and a bit of openness and interest the insights come. Of course, it has not always been easy, but learning this way is learning from experience and not with a lot of study and limiting oneself to a specific narrow topic. I don’t get so much of this back home. Even though … Well, maybe I didn’t until now, but actually most of the time in Slovenia so far I’ve been studying or doing some not so intensive voluntary work. The days that are coming for me now could actually be far more dynamic in that sense. I will soon finish my studies and start with my professional life, where I will be a pure beginner connecting what I have studied with life experience. You see, that’s why I like writing, I’ve just realized that. And suddenly my return home doesn’t seem so frightening any more. It’s true, that some things will stay behind (and now I can at least name them), but the most important and deep of them, will be somewhere in me. Maybe not so present in my everyday thoughts, but I believe they will pop out just in the right moments. And what’s more, there will be new possibilities opening. However in everything I will do, there will be something of my past experience in Jordan. It may sound slightly too much, but life will “never be the same”.
by Krištof
European Voluntary Service 