Monday, May 14, 2012

Party Day

Today was our last day of official tutoring. The past few times have had some sparse attendance or we don’t really know who is going to show up. Well this morning I had Ndamiwe come and I tried to have him go home and get his brother Justice, but there must have been some communication issues because Justice didn’t come right away, and when he did come, our tutoring time was over. Oh well.

For English we did some review games, a review worksheet, and some reading comprehension on our Kafue adventure this weekend. I’m trying to savor every last class we have with our ladies. We have one more tomorrow and then our little gathering with them on our last day, Wednesday.

After English we headed straight into town to get some groceries for our party tonight. We were so grateful to Dee for taking us so we didn’t have to take a minibus. I took care of getting some pictures printed, and Erika went shopping for the napkins, cups and biscuits. Unfortunately, they told me the pictures would take 1 ½ hours to print; right when our afternoon tutoring was supposed to start. So after Dee’s shopping got over, she suggested we stay for lunch and hope the pictures get done in that time. So we all had chicken pitas at Galitos, which were delicious! And lucky for us, our photos were done after we were finished eating! Which was great because then that meant we didn’t have to go back after our afternoon tutoring.

As soon as we got back from town we had our afternoon group of kids come and it was quite the group. We had been telling the kids they could come whenever they wanted so we had a big group show up. We had Given, Dalitso, Stone, Obey, Mwandida, Shadreck, Jeremiah, Samuel, Pimbi, Mirriam, and Shine, plus Stone brought chunky Jeffter. So we all played games together; we did memory and Simon Says. And by “we” I mean Erika did the games. I pretty much sat and played with Jeffter the whole time. J I also took some pictures of the fun and did flashcards with Shad for a bit when he got sick of the games. It was a crazy loud, fun afternoon. Boy do those kids like to scream when they’re having fun!

In the afternoon we decided we had to be productive by organizing all our tutoring and English materials for the next group. We actually did pretty well with that and got most of the worksheets and lesson plans organized. Then we had an afternoon visit from Jennifer, one of the friends we made in choir at Bethel. She wanted to come over one last time to say goodbye, so that was sweet of her. We sat in our living room and chatted for a bit, but sadly we couldn’t spend a lot of time doing that because we had to head over to campus to set up for our party. Jennifer came to help us set up, which was very nice.

We got the food ready and the chairs set out and got all the certificates in order. It took a good hour to prepare everything and since we’re on Zambian time anyway, everyone slowly started trickling in shortly after 5. By the time most people were there it was close to 5:30. We invited the whole campus family; all our tutoring and preschool kids plus their moms and dads. We had a great turnout! Some kids were just getting back from school but came as soon as they could. We had everyone show up in the end. We started out by passing out all the preschool kids a certificate and a picture of us with the preschoolers, plus a fizzer which is a stick of candy. Then all the tutoring kids got the same thing, a certificate, picture and fizzer. It was so cute! All the parents clapped and cheered and the moms ran up to hug their kids when they won their awards.
After the awards we had some snacks which were a PB&J sandwich and some marie biscuits, with juice. They all seemed to enjoy it and spent the rest of the party chatting and eating. Then we took some pictures with some of the families. Titus brought his camera so he was getting lots of requests for pictures. We enjoyed talking with those that hung around a little later. They all expressed how sad they were for us to leave and how they just wanted us to stay longer. It’s so nice to hear how much they appreciate what we’ve done for them. I don’t want them to think that we are joyfully leaving though; it hurts so much to have to say goodbye to these people and if I could, I know I would stay here for years if I could. It’s hard to express all the complicating factors to them though, so instead I just tell them how much I’ve loved it here and how much I will miss all of them. Erika and I are already planning how we’re going to get back here within the next 2 years to see our campus “family” before they graduate and disperse.
We were so pleased with how the party turned out. Everything just went perfectly and it was so cool to all be together as a campus, celebrating our time here.
We had some of our regular boys stick around, because they never want to leave, and helped us clean up. We gave them leftover sandwiches as payment. J

We headed home around 6:30pm and had a quick avocado sandwich for supper before heading over to Sargents for Nathan’s 13th birthday party. The partygoers were Birners, Wendlands, Sargents, Dee and us. We had a Malawian shanty, which is lemonade, ginger ale and bitters. I remember my dad always made those for us in Malawi when we were kids. We chatted and then had cake. It was a fun evening.

Today was one of those go, go, go days. We didn’t have our usual couple hour break for lunch and we had party after party. It was a perfect day though, I wouldn’t have changed anything.

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