Day 44, I got my first taste of one of the sadder experiences at Mseleni, namely the departure of a doctor. The nature of most of the doctors, and some of the therapists, mean that we are all fairly transient. Stays vary between months to a year on the whole and people constantly overlapping. I get the feeling that most here have become quite used to the idea of friends leaving and new faces coming in.
The joy of being such a close community that treat each other as families is that the loss of a member affects you that much more. And though they maybe moving onto their lives in the outside world you can’t help but feel a pang of guilt at the wish for them to stay. It isn’t simply because it means there is one less person to share the workload of the day, or one less person to go to for help, or even one less person to go away with for a weekend trip. It is more the feeling of losing a connection.
My time in Mseleni has been brief but the friends I have made feel much longer standing. Of course, we say goodbye with food and drink and warm embraces, and we speak of remaining in touch with all the ways and means afforded by modern technology, but one wonders how it will be once the “real world” intervenes. That is not say that what I am experiencing here is any less real, but more that it is likely to be the anomaly rather than the norm. And once we are taken out of this world of Mseleni, will I still be able to maintain the bonds I have made? I would certainly hope that I could.
I suppose before the end of this year I will feel this way again on more than one occasion and end up approaching it with the same sort of bonhomie as everyone else, such is the nature of life in our little corner of the world.
Dude.... you never said that about leaving us in the UK.... No welcome home party for you!
ReplyDeleteP.S. Hope all's good.