Hello and Goodbye

Hello out there to everyone who reads these posts! First I have to apologize for the long and abrupt absence from Petunia in Paradise with no warning, and thank you to those of you who have contacted me to make sure I am still ok. I was truly touched that you cared enough to check up on me!

I am still alive and kicking but with a rather major change: I am no longer in Paradise. I left at the end of July and after spending 2 weeks in Kenya with Simba's family and our friends, we both flew to the US. Although I suppose it is possible that I will return to Southern Sudan at some point in my life, I will not be going back anytime in the near future.

When I left Sudan I didn't know what to write. I could not sit down and rationally write what was going through my mind or what went on because it was too much and changed daily. With most of the Petunia in Paradise posts I wrote them over a period of several days or weeks rather than all at once, but once gone I was moving too fast to make the posts I was writing relevant. I started the goodbye post a dozen times and have not yet made it to the end. So this will have to do for now.

I have not yet decided what I am going to do with this blog, or blogging. Once I arrived back in the US I realized a big reason why I spent a chunk of my free time online reading and writing blogs was not only to keep the people I know and love in the loop of what is going on with my life, but as a form of escape. It let me de-stress at the end of the day, and diving into other people's blogging worlds was a form of avoiding my own problems. Don't get me wrong, I have been fortunate to read some great writing out there and met a lot of people who I am very privileged to know. And I will keep reading and writing in the future! But it just feels strange now spending as much time online because I feel that I don't need it anymore. I don't need blogs as a crutch to pass the time to get through my day. I can freely be happy with my own thoughts and live life to the fullest instead of just existing or counting down time until my next R&R. So that's where I've been for the past couple months, detaching the chain connecting me to my laptop.

At the end of September I will be moving to London to start a Master's Degree program in Control of Infectious Diseases. Simba is here with me in the US, and is also applying for a visa and to University programs. Hopefully his visa will be processed as quickly as mine and we can both be in the same place. We received a very generous offer from an acquaintance to house-sit her house in London rent free for the year we will be there, and another generous offer from Beatrice to stay with her and her Husband until we can move into that house in October. The stars were more than aligned with those arrangements!

Do you want me to keep this going, even though I will not be in a place as off-the-beaten-path as Sudan? Should I change the blog name? After all, if Southern Sudan was Paradise, would London then be...Purgatory? Petunia in Purgatory?

I am so thrilled that I now have this account of my experience in Southern Sudan; I do have a few more things written from my time in Sudan, and will post those shortly, but if my posts were infrequent before they will probably be even more so now.

Thanks again to all the readers out there, and hope to hear from you all soon.

Peace, Petunia

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Some announcements are in order:

I have been accepted into a Master's program in Control of Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. So July will be my last month in Juba and as of mid-September I will be moving to London! To say I am excited would be a gross, gross understatement.

Starting in about a month until I leave, I will no longer be managing HIV programs, but assessing designing a monitoring and evaluation system for my organization which stretches across multiple health areas with multiple donors.

Pretty sweet! I love monitoring and evaluation, and getting to work in different health areas is a perfect way to end my time here. And it will let me see more of Southern Sudan than I have been able to in the current scope of our activities, so that is a great perk as well.

We are trying to find a way for Simba to come with me to London. This is no easy task considering that he has a Kenyan passport and the developed country immigration gods do not look kindly upon that nationality. But we're working on it.

It's strange to be thinking about leaving. I spent so much time getting used to life here, and now I'm in a groove, but soon will be transitioning out. I am ready to go, that's for sure, but am a little more excited about leaving than I would like to be. If that makes any sense. There's so many things I haven't done yet that I wanted to. Like speak Juba Arabic better, learn to ride a motorcycle, etc etc. But I still have about 5 months in which to do them!