Packing my handful of t-shirts and Caribbean souvenirs into two suitcases – 15 minutes.

Changing over names and information for Internet and lease accounts, saying goodbye to friends, neighbors, cooperadores, community partners, and Laura, Jon, Dana, Meg, and Nicole – 1 week.

Fulfilling my term as co-founder and one of the first International Programs Directors for Health Horizons International – Eternity.  And by eternity, I mean 10 months.  But it feels endless.  The work is never-ending, and my dedication enduring, after all.

I write as I sit on the plane flying me back to New Jersey, and my mind simultaneously resists the urge to parachute myself out of here back to Montellano (where neighbors and friends said goodbye by sharing fried cheese and offering gifts of plastic angel figurines) and the urge to propel myself faster than this plane is capable of taking me into the United States (where seatbelts and efficiency, comfort and family will be at my fingertips).

I don’t have the words that sum up what this past year has been like for me or for Horizontes de Salud.  Something akin to parachuting out of an airplane and propelling forward toward a destination, I think.  What I do have is an extreme amount of gratitude for everybody and everything that allowed for it to happen.  What began as a year-long adventure on a tropical island, a single feeling of compulsion to commit to action, and a glimmer of hope in the musings of a handful of dreamers, has developed into a fully functioning international not-for-profit organization fighting to effect sustained positive change – the first of its kind in the region of Puerto Plata.

As I go on to medical school, “going home to be able to come back,” in the words of new IPD Meg, I leave behind an organization continuing to build a new vision for improving community health in the barrios and bateyes of the northern Dominican coast.  I trust HHI’s leaders will improve the current system that links the passion and experience of international personnel and resources with the realness and necessity of local capacity building and health improvements, while learning from challenges and successes along the way, openly and constructively, never too proud to change for the better.  I enthusiastically remain on HHI’s Board of Directors, playing whatever advisory and supportive role I can this upcoming year.

I know Laura, Nicole, and Megan will continue to effectively expand upon this idea of serving the underserved and marginalized based on a model of solidarity, even though the geographic, cultural, historical, and social distances between the reality of the situation on the ground and that which those of us that work there have the capacity to understand, seem impossibly large.

Still, before moving to the island last October, I had been back and forth several times throughout the past five years, learning, acting, and becoming better, proving to the universe that distances are not so stagnant, or so impossibly long.  I believe the space between here and there is dynamic and relational depending on where you are coming from, where you are, and where you want to go.  For me, it has never been so clear yet so hazy.  I have never felt so full of strength but also ridden with anxiety.  I continue to parachute and propel myself onward, respecting the journey, designing the path, and remaining optimistic of what remains beyond the horizon, regardless of the length of the distance or number of hurdles along the way.

With hope and gratitude posting from New Jersey,

Angi

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