smacky and bucky

As I've mentioned here before, I was in the Peace Corps from 1997 to 1999. Our group consisted of 50 people. Some I got to know very well, some I spoke to only in passing. You put 50 different people together for three months in a small compound, and they will invariably break into small groups. One of the people I only knew superficially was Julie. She was the youngest in our group, just out of college and barely 21, a minister's daughter. She was fresh-faced, and naive about a lot of things. Looking at her, you had to wonder what on earth she was thinking coming to a small African country for two years, having never been away from her support group of family and church.

She toughed it out and made it through the first three months of training (which quite a few older, more experienced people couldn't do) and was sworn in as a volunteer with the rest of us in September 1997 (right after the death of Princess Diana, if you need a frame of reference). Around Thanksgiving of that year, she got sick in her village, sick enough to be sent to the United States for treatment. She ended up not returning, and like everyone else that left early, she was never given another thought. That sounds really cold, but these people were returning to the place we all missed, the place where people spoke English, and the food was good, and the water was safe to drink. We were secretly a little envious, and also secretly relieved it wasn't us returning early. Hardly anyone ever kept in touch with people who left early. We couldn't relate to them anymore, and they couldn't relate to our experience. The Peace Corps called it Early Termination, or E.T. It was a verb: She et-ed.

I was surfing around yesterday during lunch, browsing various sites about Peace Corps. I saw Julie's name, and for the first time since 1997, I pictured her in my mind. The link went to a memorial page for her. She died in a car wreck in 2003. She had gotten her master's and had been hired as a middle school teacher a month before she died. She had spoken about wanting to return to Africa someday to do it again and see it through. I know people aren't static, but don't you always tend to picture people as they were when you last saw them? If you don't keep up with them, in your mind they are always in the same place, doing the same thing. I can't believe she died almost two years ago. I'm sorry she didn't get to finish, and I'm sorry she didn't get to return. I didn't get to know her very well. I know she liked board games and was religious. She smiled a lot. I'm clearly not the one to write the eulogy, and it's two years late anyway.