home for my birthday!!!!!

i just set my return date and i should be arriving home on my birthday!!!(october 18th for you ignorami :) i was going to get home november 1st, but the idea of being home for my (and kate's) birthday was just too nice to pass up (family dinner!!!). plus, i feel like my work here is coming to an end. my staff get better and better every day and i have started to be around the WHC less in order to make them depend less on the presence of an expat- they take much more initiative when i'm not there to make all of the decisions for them. i feel like i can leave in october and know that the women's health centre is going to remain fantabulous. not that this means
it's going to be easy to leave- it won't be. my emotional attachments here are going to make it such that it's never going to feel like a good time to leave- especially knowing what i am leaving them to. knowing that, i just had to set a date and i will deal with it when i always deal with things(one day in the distant future in therapy :) my earlier leaving date also has something to do with the U.N. troops. i don't want to be here much in october as the A.U. will be gone, the U.N. will be under pressure to set a date to deploy and i don't want to be anywhere near this country when they set a date. plus, if they set a date for october or november, we would be evacuated anyways.
i just calculated that i only have 22 days left in habillah. i leave for my
holiday on the 14th and i get back on the 28th (flight schedules make it so that i'm on holidays for 5 days and i'm sitting in el geneina or khartoum waiting for flights for over a week), then i leave here october 9th. what an odd feeling to finally settle into a life so different from your own and then leave it to go back to what you're used to.
alright, time to get back to my ipod (aka my lifeline)