Amahoro=Peace

Tuesday morning started with a new breakfast meal consisting of fresh bagels! So fresh i had to actually cut them myself the night before! Probably the best bagels I’ve ever had. Even better than Midnight Oil’s in Searcy..now that’s a feat. But Greenhills went well as usual. We read the story of The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig and they loved it. We had previously read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and we compared them to each other. The did such a great job and even thought of things that I didn’t even consider. My kids continually blow me away with how smart they are. And I’ve had to learn a lot of patience because some of those kids, if you just give them a little more time to think about things and process them, you realize that they know just as much as the other kids that they’re with. There is just so much potential that is flowing inside of those little brains. Then at Kicukiro I felt like we had a fairly good day. Those kids have learned so many words and are now making sentences with them. We presented them with 26 words Tuesday which was the most we’ve given them in one day. They struggled a little more than normal I felt like that day but I would say the majority of them still did a great job. We had the 4th graders at school that day and that was the last time we got to work with those two classes. It is getting to be so unbelievably sad. Tomorrow is our last day at Green Hills and that is just bad news. I can’t stand leaving any of these children. Green Hills is going to be sad because we’ve made relationships with the children and lots of teachers there, and Kicukiro is just as sad but in a different way. Today (Wednesday) at Kicukiro when we left I almost cried because I just want to sit down and play and talk with every one of those kids and just give them a little love and attention, but it’s just not possible when there’s 3200 of them. I know some time before we leave on Saturday the tears are going to be flowing. It is not helped by the fact that everyone keeps asking us to stay and the thing is…we all want to stay! I can’t talk about it any more. It’s too sad.

After school was done we went to a place called Amahoro. That means “peace” in Kinyarwanda and it is a shop where widows are taught to make bags, necklaces, aprons, etc. for pay. Everything they made was beautiful and the people were so nice to us. After that we went to an Indian restaurant (Yes..in Africa!) called Zaffron. They had crazy costumes and the food was delicious!! I could not believe how good it was. We ate there with two of the teachers we met here and had so much fun.

Africa has brought more joy to my life than I could have ever imagined possible.

Hayley