The end of an era: A goodbye speech

The dreaded goodbye speech. How can anyone put such a life-altering experience into words and then share it with a group of people you cant say goodbye to without breaking down into tears?

I ended up writing my goodbye speech down on scraps of paper before reading it to a campfire of puffy eyes and nostalgic minds. And as I breathed the last words into the fire pit in front of me, I realized that the tears in my eyes and the stuttering in my speech probably hid the fact that what I had written was intended to be a poem. So, here it is.

Photo credit: Pam Gamboa

The first time I left this place,
I had a pit in my stomach
that ended up lasting for two months.
The cure, as it turns out,
ended up being a plane back to Kathmandu
and a bus back to Sindhupalchowk.
And when I looked across the rice terraces
and spotted the rows of tents up the hill,
I knew I was home.

But when I woke up in these mountains for the second time this year,
there were new faces.
New colors added to the rainbow of tents
that I never knew existed.
And there were old colors too.
Ones who planted roots and grew with the school they built.
There was a school where there once was a pile of dirt,
and there was a brick building where there was once one made of CGI.
There was an empty patch of land where I remembered an office,
and there were four toilets where I remembered an empty patch of land.
But we still had dal bhat for lunch,
we still ate flat rice on Wednesdays,
and I still felt the same sense of peace sipping tea around the fire after work.
Everything had changed, except nothing had.

And you became my new family.
Each from different corners of this wonderful world,
brought together on this side of a mountain for one shared purpose:
To build the school.
And though each of you come from different countries,
different villages,
at different phases in your lives,
with different reasons for traveling,
you are all such inspiring,
hardworking,
crazy-wonderful,
amazing human beings.

You are stunning,
you are breathtaking,
and you are beautiful.

When you are covered in sweat,
pushing wheelbarrows of sand and gravel,
you are beautiful.
When you are mixing cement in full gear,
with a face mask and fake tattoo sleeves,
you are beautiful.
When you are cleaning toilets with a rubber glove,
or plastered from head to toe in oil based paints,
you are beautiful.
When you haven’t shit in twelve days,
or you can’t stop shitting twelve times a day,
you are beautiful.
And when you dance to “Free Tibet” when the day is done
and the school is handed over,
you are beautiful.

You are the most beautiful souls in this universe,
and you have done something incredible on this mountainside.
And as tonight ends,
and we go our separate ways,
remember the beautiful legacy you leave.

You finished this project.
You changed these lives.
You built this school.
You made a difference.

And maybe, one day in the future,
we can do it again sometime.