good-bye Arusha

The past six weeks have gone by so quickly; I cannot belive my time in Arusha is over!! This has been a wonderful last week. I read with a lot of kids, created this alphabet game and played it wil children at that stage, worked with the baby class, tutored a few intermediate class kids, and created more teaching aids. It was def a good last week working with these kids. It just stunk to have two days of good-byes!

Wednesday was my last day at Kisongo. I was so touched by some of the teachers and how sad they were that I was leaving and one that I bonded with really well actually refused to say bye to me! The kids were all very cute in sayin bye. I even received a few letters from some of the boys which were just wonderful. Kids' writing is funny as it is but when they are writing in their second language they are even more fun to read.

Today was my last day with the kids at the Center. I was definitely closer to these children simply for spending more tie with them and the atmosphere being more of where they live and not just where they go to school. Trisha was very sweet and had all the kids draw me pictures/write notes so they kept delivering them to me all afternoon. The also all gathered and sang good-bye songs to me. Ah- it was so hard to leave these kids. I wish I could express better in words what things were like. It is just nice to know that as much as these kids have touched me and impacted me I have left something with them as well. One of the girls that barely talked to me when I started is one that said bye to me three or four times and ran after me at the gate to say bye again! Helena was being a litte pistol this morning not wanting to look at me and being pouty but then this afternoon she was attached to my hip like normal. I did not want to put her down and leave her! I decided to be her sponsor so even though in a few years she will forget about me because she is so young, she will always have a spot in my heart and I hope to come bck and she her as she grows up.

I will be leaving for Kenya in the morning and spending my last three weeks there. Happy Life is having a fundraising walk on Saturday so I am very excited to make it back for that and cannot wait to see all of those children again even though I know some of them have been returned to family members or adopted. I will update ya'll on them next week.

It is only appropriate that end my last Arusha post with telling you about food! Wednesday we went out with our only other Western friend, Diane, who works with Living Water. We had sodas at this lodge that you can sit and look out to a watering hole with zebras, elands, ostriches, peacocks, herons, etc. I have never seen an eland before nor much about them but one come up close to us so I got to pet it which was cool! We then went out to dinner to a real Tanzanian place and had chicken! It was real, good, tasety chicken! This mean also involved fries and salad and no utensils. It does not even phase me anymore to eat without utensils! It was also a power cut night so we spent most of the evening by the light of the month which I think helped becuase then I didnt realize how messy my fingers were getting!!