"in our wide world there are many goings home"

Three months ago I returned "home". I came back with my rubbermaid trunks eleven sweaters, three tee shirts, four books, and two binders fuller. I came back two and a half inches taller, a few pounds heavier, with hair lighter and longer, skin tan and winter worn. I returned changed, in these, and in many more, less quantifiable ways, to the life that belonged to me for nearly seventeen years after only four months away.
The last three months have been a constant struggle to answer others' questions regarding defining my semester and how I grew and changed, and a struggle to answer my own of how I am changing now, after the adventure.

In ways I still cannot quite pin-point, I changed between January and June. I knew HMI** would change my perspective/attitude towards life and shape me in big and small ways. BUT what I didn't really consider was that I would be forced to change yet again as I learn to reconcile who I was before I left, who I was when I was gone, and who I want myself to be during my final year of high school.

Some days, as I immerse myself in the Arapahoe community and my life here, it seems like the best option would be to forget, to move on and pretend like my semester at HMI was just the long, long dream it seems to be fading into. There will be other experiences, other chances to shake up my life, other people to love. After all in words of Semisonic "every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end".
But at other times, when all I can do is think of how much I miss the community of RMS XXVI, my heart yearns and fights to return and maintain those relationships as they were. In those times, I cannot understand how anyone can be expected to say goodbye and move on from a community as strong and an experience so full as last semester.
However, I know that both of these options are impossible. I must change again, combine who I was before and who I was during into who I am to be. I must ask myself the big question rolling around in my head:

How do people change after an adventure and are forced to return "home" or to the life they previously held? How do they cope with this transformation?

In The Poisonwood Bible, the characters go on a grand and life changing adventure as a missionary family in the Congo. Kingsolver spends the first two thirds of the book describing their experiences in the Congo, shaping how the Price Family changes over the two years in the jungle. But the remaining 160 pages are spend on the subject of "going home", or deciding not to in some of the character's cases.

Orleanna and Adah return to Mississippi, but not to the lives they had held before. The noticeable difference is the lack of Nathan in their lives, the new found independence from the controlling man he was. They returned to the same old Bethlehem as very different people. Orleanna stayed distant from her old life by moving to cabin on the outskirts of town. Orleanna seems to be at ease with who she is back "home" in Bethlehem, Mississipi. Adah escaped having to return by attending Emory and becoming a doctor in Atlanta. Adah learned to walk without a crooked gait, and her voice is different in the final chapters, as Kingsolver noticeably drops the use of palindromes in Adah's narration. However, Adah is not entirely contented with how she has changed since coming home : "I miss those poems. Sometimes at night, in secret, I still limp purposefully around my apartment, Life Mr. Hyde, truing to recover my old self"(pg. 492). She relates who she was in the Congo to who she is now, and clearly is uncomfortably with the fact she shed her "old skin" with leaving Africa.

Nathan, Rachel, Leah and Ruth May never return to their old lives. Ruth May obviously couldn't seeing as she died, Nathan refused to leave his missionary work, however failed. Rachel doesn't move back into her old life, instead moving into the role of wife, then business owner, a series of events that seem to be brought and lived with apathy on Rachel's part, not by deliberate choices.
Leah, on the other hand, never stopped moving, never stopped trying to find a place that feels like home. She did not return to Mississippi, because there she was her father's daughter, and in the Congo that all changed. Leah stayed because of Anatole, maybe, but also because she could not bear to let go of the transformative experience of the first two years in the Congo. She refused to let go of any part of who she became while in Africa, even the times she visited Orleanna and Adah, she could not stay.

So, I guess in the Poisonwood Bible we have two people that go home as dramatically different people, one that finds a life to be at peace with, one that made the choice to move on, but misses who she was. Two that never returned home, but not because of any particular choice to stay. And two that found themselves bound to their adventure, to Africa, both choosing to stay with the intent to save.

None of the character's the the Poisonwood Bible were forced to return back to the same life they held before going to the Congo, and that makes me wonder, am I really forced to return to the exact life I held before, or has it transformed as I make small choices contributing to who I am as I again make this place my home?

**for all reading this blog that have no idea what I am talking about when I say my semester away or HMI or RMS XXVI, here's the website of the semester program I did Spring 2011: http://www.hminet.org/HMIsemester

Title comes from "after the adventure" by Morgan Hite