April is coming to an end.

Not in some sweeping, poetic way, but in the way seasons do. The light changes, the evenings cool just enough, and the dust season reminds me it is waiting. I’m sure you remember how much I hate the dust. And true to form, the goats remain unbothered by all of us.

This shift is showing up on the calendar, too. Not as one thing, but as several, all at once.

Endings, beginnings, and the middle of service all happening at the same time.

Host family trainings are starting. That means we are deep in the messy business of trying to explain how to live together, and how to welcome an American Volunteer into a family and prepare them for service. Expectations, boundaries, food, water, privacy.

All the things that sound simple but they aren’t. You know this better than you did before. It is careful, often delicate work.

At the same time, language training is training trainers. Trainers are planning on training trainees. I’ve already heard heated conversations about participatory methods and whether a flipchart needs one more color. It is slightly chaotic and very earnest. And somehow, every year, the process produces incredible Volunteers and uses up an unbelievable amount of flip chart paper.

And for some of you, this is also the start of your first full year in. The point where service stops feeling new and starts feeling real. Where the learning curve flattens just enough that you see things more clearly including yourself in it

.Close of Service Conference is coming, too. COS is not about wrapping up neatly. It is where the story you thought you were going to have meets the one you actually lived. Where people say out loud what worked, what didn’t, what they’re proud of, and what still doesn’t sit right.

And here’s what we don’t say often enough, and I am not going to miss the opportunity now.

There is no single right version of that story.

Some of you are finishing strong, exactly as you hoped. Some of you are tired in a way that doesn’t make sense. Some of you did work that will outlast you. Some of you spent a lot of time just trying to figure out how to be here.

All of that is the work.

Then there’s the final Pre-Departure call. A group of people sitting somewhere far from here, trying to imagine what their life is about to look like. Some excited, most anxious about getting the packing right, as if packing is the key to success during the next two years.

Some nervous, some absolutely convinced they know who they’re going to be when they arrive.

They don’t.

And neither did you. Neither did I.

For those of you closing service, you are handing something forward, whether you can see it or not.

For those of you hitting your one-year mark, you are stepping into something different. You are no longer the newest. You are the ones who know how things actually work here, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

And for those about to arrive, they will be new. Fully, rightfully new. They should be as that is part of the design.

All three of those things are happening at once.

They will inherit the way your community talks about Peace Corps. The expectations your counterparts carry. They will inherit the tone you set in meetings, whether you meant to or not. The habits you created on purpose, and the ones you didn’t realize you were creating.

The season is changing and the handovers are about to begin.

So before you rush past it, take a second.

Look at what’s still yours to shape.

Think about what you want to pass forward, to hand over.

You still have time.

Yours in service,

Jean

We will not all be together tomorrow for Thanksgiving, but if we were, I know exactly what would happen. Someone would hand me a glass and ask for “opening remarks,” mostly because you are cheeky and enjoy watching me suffer. I would sigh, stand up, and offer a toast.

And in that toast, I would try to explain that I think Thanksgiving is really about the table.

Not the food, not the parade, not the football, not the Black Friday deals. Not even the cream of mushroom soup that somehow holds all Minnesota cooking together.

The table. Just the table.

My childhood Thanksgivings were at tables with a mix of neighbors, friends, and other people’s families who made room without hesitation. Someone would grab a chair from the garage while someone else burned the rolls. Dogs would circle for scraps. Another plate would appear from a cupboard no one has opened in years. There was always an extra chair, always a way to make more space.

Maybe that is why I notice it so much now, how a table expands to make room, how a gathering becomes warmer (and often more interesting) simply because someone said come join us.

And this year, you are far from home. Yet someone back there is thinking about you as they chop onions or stir gravy. Your name will come up in a story, one that you relayed that likely features a goat and a minibus. Someone is wondering about your holiday halfway across the world.

And here in Malawi, your Thanksgiving will be different. It might be small. It may be improvised. It might just be a table pulled onto a khonde covered in chitenje, steady enough to not care about the wobble. It might a table with an eclectic mix of Volunteers, neighbors, host families, someone’s cousin, someone who has nowhere else to go. It may be a meal eaten outdoors because the power went out for the third time that day.

But knowing you, you will widen the table. You always do. Somehow there be space, and another chair will appear. Someone may eat standing, but the table will still have grown because of you.

Returned Volunteers carry this instinct with them forever. Wherever we land next, in apartments, compounds, or tiny houses, we gather whoever is nearby and say:

Whoever you are, there is a place for you here.

The real tradition isn’t the turkey.

It’s widening the table, adding one more chair.

It’s not even Aunt Joy’s fluorescent green jello salad that she will make until the end of time because tradition is tradition.

It’s turning strangers into a circle.

So next week, wherever you find yourself eating nsima with your host family or attempting stuffing on a gas burner or squeezed around an RPCV’s table, I’d raise my glass to:

To the tables you widen, and to the circles you build.

And to the truth that whoever you are, wherever you are, there is always a place for you.

Busy setting the table,

Jean

But this Dispatch?

This one’s for those of you feeling the heat of the messy middle.

The part no one claps for. The stretch that’s less “new adventure” and more “wait… is this really it?”

By now you’ve figured out the squat, timed your laundry with the sun, mastered cooking nsima by headlamp, and bathing from a bucket with the elegance of a flamingo in a Malawian windstorm.

You’ve made friends, lost counterparts, survived the double dragon with nothing but ORS and spite. The adrenaline’s gone. The awe has dulled. The routines are clockwork.

And yet - you’re still here.

And somewhere between the third community meeting that started two hours late and rewriting another session plan, the questions begin to stir:

What kind of person am I growing into?

Am I finding joy and purpose at my site?

Am I acting from integrity or just out of obligation?

You might not say it out loud. Or maybe you do. Maybe you tell it to your cat. Either way, the wondering shows up in your journal, in your body, in the dust on the way home, when you’re not sure your presence mattered at all.

This middle. This mess.

Peace Corps calls it the “Disillusionment Phase”. Your PCMO gives you the graph at PST. Psychologists give you the jargon. You call it “Week 53, Tuesday, 10:17 a.m.” And you all know how much I hate a Tuesday.

Whatever you call it, here’s what I want you to know:

This doesn’t mean you’re failing. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad Volunteer.

It just means you’ve entered the forge.

Because that’s exactly where you are.

Metaphorically, obviously. You’re still in Malawi. But you know how I love a good metaphor. Even more than a clever pun.

The forge is hot. It’s uncomfortable and it’s chaotic.

It messes with the structure of things. (It’s supposed to.)

The elements shift. Edges crack. Oxidation occurs. (Also supposed to happen.)

You discover what parts of you were solid all along and how real strength comes not from the hardening, but the tempering. Where you take the heat again, but this time, learn to hold it without cracking.

And no, it doesn’t look noble. Rarely does.

Sometimes it looks like crying in your chitenje behind the pit latrine, because your chiperekera didn’t show up and your last tomato is missing. Or explaining a menstrual cycle diagram while a goat eats your flipcharts and a granny asks why you don’t have children. Or a meeting that starts four hours late, circles three topics, and ends with you buying Fantas. Again.

Volunteers have long tried to explain this phase with metaphors and memes. Most just scribble “WTF is happening?” on the back of a weathered postcard waiting to be mailed and then reach for the peanut butter.

Because the messy middle is just that. A hot mess.

And when you’re the one in it (when you are the mess) it’s easy to forget this is still part of the story.

But I see you braving it. Taking on that fire.

I’ve had a few honest conversations with you in the middle lately. One of you came for a sugar hit from the candy jar and sank into my couch, talking through what the first year taught you. What you’d do differently. What still matters. I saw sincerity in your reflection.

Another named it plainly. “This is my existential crisis”. And someone else just shrugged in true Peace Corps fashion and said, “It sucks… but I guess we get through it.”

None of it was polished. All of it was real. And for me, an honor to be trusted with your unfiltered reflections.

It brought me back to my own. To my 22-year-old self. (You’ve already been introduced.) She, too, fell into the messy middle. Wildly unqualified. A bit raw and just beginning to understand how little she understood.

That year, I made a list in my Lesotho journal titled: “Top 10 Lessons from My First Year of Service.”

Most of it was painfully earnest. Some of it, ridiculous. A few bits funny. I can still see her. Cross-legged on a sagging Peace Corps-issued mattress (you know the one). Squinting through candlelight, wrapped in her Basotho blanket, and still a bit bitter I didn’t get the pony.

Trying to make meaning from the mess.

Rereading the Top 10 list made me cringe in places, smile in others.

Number four (#4) was a love letter to my pink translucent pee bucket. It lived beside my bed like a loyal, codependent best friend.

We had an intimacy that defied dignity - until one midnight emergency… it cracked. The horror reigns eternal.

Number seven (#7) was an ode to the word “izit?”The South Africans claim it’s English, but it should be universal. It means: “Is this real?” “Is this okay?” and also, “I’ve stopped understanding, but please continue.” Versatile. Diplomatic. Gets the job done.

But not all of it was funny. Some of it hurt, ached, to reread.

I saw how hard I was trying, how desperate I was to do something meaningful. How I wrestled with grief and injustice I didn’t yet know how to name. The horrors I witnessed. The sounds, the scents that haunted me. How I wrote about not being fully seen. About loneliness -the kind that settles in your bones. How I pretended everything was fine, because sometimes that was the only way to get through the day. Smile and pretend. Rinse and repeat.

And I still remember hearing that tormenting whisper: Are you still sure you can do this?

Reading it now, across time and distance, I can see what she couldn’t: I wasn’t failing. I was just in the fire. Displeased about it, yes - but being reshaped in ways I didn’t yet understand.

And number one on that list (naïve, sincere, awkwardly poetic) was this:

“#1: Somehow I keep thinking there is hope. And I’m a bit surprised with myself.”

I feel quite protective of her now.

Because her hope didn’t look like fireworks. It looked like a slow burn. It looked like stubbornness. It looked like sheer refusal to give in to the whisper that said she wasn’t enough.

So that was my alchemy, not just surviving the messy middle, but refusing to let go of hope inside of it. My shift from breaking to becoming.

What’s working for you might look different. You might not even know what it is yet.

But whatever it is — trust it. It knows the way through.

So if this middle feels rough, uncertain, uninspiring, please hear me:

You are not failing. You are not broken. You are being shaped.

And you are more than enough.

And I believe, with everything in me, that one day you’ll look back on this messy chapter and you will say:

This is where I found my edge. This is where I melted, and then reformed.

This is when I stopped performing and claimed the service that was mine to shape.

Because this fire, this forge? It didn’t break me. It made me as strong as steel.

Yours in service, always,

Jean

This one is about the dust. Because the dust is everywhere.

It drifts in overnight, settles on every surface, and waits for us to acknowledge it in the morning. You can taste it when you wake up. It coats your teeth, your tongue, the back of your throat. Congratulations. You’ve officially inhaled your environment again.

If you’ve been feeling a little crispy lately, a little “one more ask for candy and I might combust,” you’re not alone. We’re deep in the dry stretch now, when everything slows down, tempers shorten, and patience evaporates before mid-afternoon.

The dust gets into everything. Your lungs, your mood. Your sense of humor.

It even got to my cats.

In an absolute betrayal of all that is good and sanitary, they’ve started rolling in it, moving from outside to inside like tiny gremlins, tracking red dirt into the sheets and over my keyboard. They’re now banned from going outside, which has led to multiple jailbreak attempts. One required me to climb a tree. I was irritated to use the skill but secretly proud I still had it. I digress.

The dryness isn’t just environmental. It sneaks into your rhythm, into the days that blur together. You wake up with less in the tank, less patience for waiting, for inspiration, for someone to notice, for literal or metaphorical rain.

So how do we keep going when the well runs dry and we’re the ones holding the bucket, squinting at the sky?

We learn to become our own rain. To refill from the inside when the sky stays quiet.

Gently, intentionally. Not as a buzzword or a hashtag, but as a practice. A remembering - an act of returning to what makes you feel human in the middle of all this red-dust chaos.

Sometimes becoming your own rain starts as a trickle. A few words on a page, the first drops that break the silence. You write, not because it’s profound, but because you need to hear your own voice again. Three pages of nonsense, one true sentence, a letter you’ll never send. Each word a small droplet of presence.

Sometimes it’s sitting under the mango tree when the air is thick and waiting. Not the glamorous mindfulness kind, but the real version, with your neighbor’s chicken kicking up dust and a goat eyeing up your laundry line. You close your eyes anyway, breathe through the stillness, and feel a ripple of peace.

Take the cold bucket bath at three in the afternoon. Not rushed or efficient, or because you absolutely need to because you haven’t in days. But let the bath be yours. Get out your best soap, pour the water slowly. Listen to the splash against the concrete, the sound of small rain meeting earth. Let the steam rise from your skin and imagine the day washing off you. Let this small kindness be enough for today.

And when the heat has won, decide Tuesday is over at two p.m. Not because you’ve failed or it’s your least favorite day at the office, but because your body asked for shade. Pull the curtains and take a nap with the windows open. Let the faint wind move across you like a breeze before rain. Eat peanut butter from the jar, barefoot, and call it a day. Zikomo, Tuesday. We’re done here.

Ask what brings you back to yourself. What still feels like joy when no one’s watching.

Then do that thing, even if it feels small. Especially if it feels small. Dance barefoot, write bad poetry. Call the friend who makes you laugh at the absurdity of it all. Let yourself want something simply because it feels good, not because it’s logical or tied to indicators.

You don’t have to love every minute. You don’t have to pretend the dust is character-building. But you do get to make room for what makes you feel whole. You do get to refill your own cup. And you absolutely get to call it a win when you create a little rain of your own and something inside feels a little more alive.

This week, notice what brings you back.

The neighbor who greets you like it’s the best part of their day.

The coffee that feels like a small ceremony.

The moment your Yao doesn’t fail you and you actually get the joke.

The text from another PCV that just says “same.”

These aren’t just moments. They’re raindrops.

Before the storms come, and the rains bring nothing but beauty and green, we keep tending, breathing, learning to become our own rain.

Some days, we’ll get it right. Steady hand, full bucket, a little grace. Other days, we’ll spill half of it chasing the cats back in the house.

Either way, we tried. That counts.

Done with the dust,

Jean