My parents sometimes joke about having boomerang children.
We leave for eight months and then come home for a summer, or skip the country for a couple of years, only to find ourselves back in the Cariboo for work.
This is, of course, an elaborate way for me to say that I am heading back onto the throwing away cycle of the boomerang’s flight, after moving back to Williams Lake in December 2016.
It’s a bittersweet moment. I started my journalism career at the Tribune in 2011, as a co-op student in high-school at Columneetza, and then worked here during a summer while I was home in 2013.
After 10 months working for the 100 Mile Free Press, I moved back to the Tribune in November of 2017. In a way, similar to when I moved back to the Cariboo from Ghana in 2016, it was like coming home.
That’s why I say it’s bittersweet to be moving on again.
I’m headed back to Ottawa, where I went to university, to work with Farm Radio International, an organization I volunteered with when I lived in Ghana. I’ll be working communications for them, where I interned, telling the stories of African farmers for their website, www.farmradio.org.
It’s been a crazy year and a half of being home. From reporting on the evacuation of Williams Lake from my Grandmother’s house, to writing stories about the resiliency of the Cariboo after we all came home, there has never not been something to do, and a story to tell.
I’ll miss Williams Lake, my coworkers work their hardest to keep people informed and to tell the stories of this community, and of course the people here whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and re-meeting during the past eight months.
I’m excited to see what stories the Tribune will continue to tell, in different ways and using different mediums, as I follow along from afar.
Thank you, as always, for being home.