I could see the lights of the city as we made our final approach, and I tried to make out anything familiar, it was difficult in the dark, but I could feel the feeling of HOME start to sink in. As the wheels touched down in Portland, and the women next to me leaned over and said, "welcome home" I smiled and held back the tears that wanted to fall.
It had been a long 46 hours. I had done two "overnight" flights, but felt far from rested.
When I walked off the plane in Korea there was a Khmer family walking in front of me that didn't speak any English and they were confused as to where they were going. I asked in my limited Khmer if I could help, and we all got a good laugh about the white girl speaking Khmer in Korea. After we all got through customs and security they told me they were moving to live with their family in Seattle, and that they wanted to cook for me if I was ever in Seattle so I could practice my Khmer. I said my final "chee-im rip lea", and fell asleep at a gate where the next flight was headed to Phnom Penh an hour after my flight to LA, and wished I was on this flight instead.
On the flight to LA I made friends with the girl next to me. She was a few months older than me and had spent the last two years in China. We bonded over our mixed feelings about returning home after such an extended time. She voiced what I was feeling, fear of forgetting the people we had become.
Landing in Portland marked 46 hours of traveling, and as the stewardess pointed out as we took off from LA, "you look terrible". The plane was small, 50 people total and when I told where I had come from, the business men and women around me became interested in the unshowered, exhausted looking girl in seat 2A. They asked questions and told me how lucky I was to have been able to do that, how they wished they had done something like that when they were young, and I was reminded how blessed I am.
As we taxied in, I wondered what it would be like to be home. In Cambodia I had become someone that I liked, someone that I respected. Someone who worked hard, and tried to care for those around her. Someone who wasn't desperate for the approval of others. Someone who was just fine by herself. Someone who had a sense of purpose.
While walking through the airport I thought about a blog Katelyn Campbell had written a while back that talked about her student missionary self being different from her home self, this is true of me as well. It didn't happen overnight, but Cambodian Annie was different. And I liked her. With my return I don't want to lose her.
On the flight from LA I finished a book I had been reading called "Reading Lolita in Tehran". It's about a woman in Tehran, she was a teacher, and she refused to compromise who she was and what she believed to appease the government. In the end she and her husband moved to the US where they currently live. On one of the last pages she said something that resonated with me as home grew closer and Cambodia farther away:
"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again."
My favorite red scarf smells like India, I've got a box full of notes from kids, scars on my legs from various accident, lonely planets stuffed with business cards and information from places I visited. I've been inspired, I've been renewed, I've been changed. I have stories of cows, motos, the sunrise, and the most wonderful children. And I hope in unpacking it all I will find I brought Cambodian Annie home with me as well.
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