Outro

At a certain point I stopped finding things I wanted to write about this summer. After a while I got so used to the lifestyle here I think that the things that were odd and different to me at the beginning began to fade into normal. For instance, it's totally normal now for me to walk down a busy road beside a huge cow. It's totally normal that drivers are on the wrong side of the road just barely swerving to not hit one another at high speed all the time. It's normal to eat with my hands and to constantly have a crush of people standing in line behind me pushing against my back. And I guess once things like that become normal there's less need to write about them.

The past few weeks have been more about deepening the normalcy actually; spending more time with the family that runs the hospital, going out to dinners, making videos of the patients, trying to cement the feeling of what daily life is like here in my memory. I've become a big lover of street food, which everyone tells me is a really dangerous habit; I haven't been sick since the first week, though, and I've eaten a lot of samosas off of banana leaves while standing at dirty stands on the side of the road. And I've gotten this sense that I'm going to be coming back here a lot over the years, so saying goodbye isn't so sad or nostalgic; everyone keeps saying "see you soon," and I feel like that's probably the case, like this is the first chapter.

I've tried not to make this too too personal (not being much a fan of public diaries), but here are a few pictures for the road; some of the people that I met who made me feel at home.