Old Friends' Day

Day 6 – 8 October 2026 – San Diego, CA, USA

 

I was especially looking forward to our stop in San Diego.  Not that I had a particular destination in mind. Rather, I was meeting up with an old and dear friend from my Peace Corps days in Liberia in the early 1980s.  Three of us lived up-country in the small village of Fissebu, and taught at the Zorzor Rural Teacher Training Institute – or ZTI, as if was known across the country.

 

RP from California and RW from Michigan shared a mud-brick house, and taught math and science (respectively) to in-service and pre-service teachers.  They were both second year volunteers, while I was a brand new baby volunteer assigned to the curriculum center at ZTI.  My job was to teach how to design and create educational materials to those same teachers in training.  I eventually added teaching Development Psychology to my job, and the two men also taught at the elementary/junior high school on our college campus.

 

As the only three Peace Corps Volunteers in our town and campus, we sort of became our own little family, often having meals together, playing cards together, even dealing with a student demonstration and riot on our campus.  (Really.  R and R stood in front of the director to protect him; I tried to do so but the women students pulled me away, afraid I’d be injured.  Instead, I went to the larger town four miles away to alert the Superintendent of Education what was going on at our school; he called in the military, which was definitely not what I had anticipated!)

 

At any rate, we became close friends, and have stayed in touch.  Haven’t seen each other in thirty-something years, though I did attend RW’s wedding.  But RP and I scheduled meeting up during our time in San Diego.

 

It was wonderful.  Some people just stay friends without having to re-acquaint themselves after decades, and we just sort of continued our conversations.  Or maybe different conversations but the same connection.  Whatever, there was still the same closeness and bond as always.

 

RP picked me up – our ship was docked right in town, and it was just a short walk up through the terminal and pier to arrive on one of the main streets in downtown San Diego!   He decided we should spend our time in La Jolla, a smaller town a bit northwest of San Diego itself, but more picturesque.

 

We walked, we talked, we had a delightful seafood lunch at a rooftop café overlooking the Pacific waves breaking on rocky cliffs and sea walls.  We talked about updates in our lives, our families, relationships, retirement and changes in our lives while being retired.  All those things people talk about when they only see each other every few decades, or talk on the phone a couple of times a year.  

 

We also walked around Sea Port so I could buy a postcard – and more talking.  Actually, some of our talking was also about having spent two years in a developing nation such as Liberia, and how eye-opening that was for young people from the US to experience such a different place and culture.  How out of context we were there, and how much we didn’t understand, how much was going on that we really had no clue about, all the subtext that is inherent in any culture.  And how strange it was to return to the US, still ourselves but also so completely changed inside and thus not the same people we had been prior to those two years in a very different country.

 

There are some people who just seem to understand each other without having to explain everything, and R and I always fit together that way, just understanding each other in an intuitive kind of way.

 

So it was a wonderful day.  Some friends we don’t need to see often to know that we care about each other.  But when we finally do spend time together, it somehow is extra special.  And this was just that kind of day.