Curse of a teacher...

On Friday exams were finished and it was time to say goodbye to our students. I stood before my P6 class and said these words through my tears, "Forgive me for being brief but I fear that I will have tears. Know that I am so very proud of all of you. It has been a privilege to be your teacher and an honor to get to know each one of you. I have known you all to be good people and I have very high hope for your future. Remember not to waste your time on jealousy, the race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself."

The rest of the day was just spending time together, taking photos, and a goodbye ceremony that the students put on for us. We hugged. We gave gifts. We cried. It was crushing pain. When I am able I will post videos of there songs but for now here are some pictures.

Then they left. Some walked, others biked, and many were loaded up on the school truck and driven away. Here you can see two students looking at me. Alice in the blue sweeter, wearing my earrings, and Diana next to her with tears in her eyes. In her hand a protection Bola I gave her.

As teachers we become invested in our students. A whole-hearted kind of investment. We try to know each one as well as we can so we can help them set goals, celebrate personal accomplishments, and help them know when they haven't tried their hardest. We become invested in their successes, their failures, their safety, their happiness... everything about their lives. They are our responsibility for at least 35 hours a week and the children of our hearts every minute of every day, holidays, weekends, and sleepless nights included. This kind of love is fruitful as we watch them grow, succeed, and eventually move on but it is also a painful love. Unavoidable heartbreak over and over again as we let them fly away. Honestly there are times in which I wonder if one can survive so much loss or if it will ever get easier. Every time you know you have helped them to become better, helped them to know more of who they are. However there is always a wish for more. Something you wish you could have done better, something you fear they will not hang on to... or fear of wrong turns and dark paths ahead. It seems impossible to have a student leave a neatly wrapped little package with no lose ends of ribbon, ready to be happily passed along with no more thought.
There are many things I do not know on this subject but I do know that in the case of students Shakespeare was right... "It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

Fort Portal Weekend!

Our group (plus an Aussie friend) went to Fort Portal on the Friday and Saturday of Easter weekend. This town is about an hour and a half away from Kasese and is cooler due to it's high altitude. We went for three important reasons: Hiking, crater lakes, and pizza.

Fort Portal actually has a pizza place called Pier Pizzeria. The food was amazing! We actually ended up eating there on our way in to town and again on our way out. We got to introduce Edson to pizza for the first time which made it even more fun. The first time we ate there was on Good Friday. While we waited for our food we saw the following outside the window...

The mass of people continues all the way down the street. I thought my grandparents especially would be interested in these pictures. (Love you grandma and grandpa!) These people walked here from the neighboring country side carrying their crosses to be a part of this precession.

After pizza we continued to the community camp where we would be spending the night. That evening we did a hike to a place called "Top of the World" where, as you can imagine, the views were amazing.

The next day we did a challenging hike to a waterfall. I would like to think that my personal trainer would have been proud that I made it back up the very steep wall of the valley. The waterfall was gorgeous and we had fun playing in it. The only slip up was when our friend slipped and fell face first into the water... with her expensive camera around her neck. Don't worry, after a week in a bag of dry rice the camera is fine. Our friend made it out with only a bruised ego ;)

Throughout the entire weekend there were of course many many monkeys...

Yeah I know my socks are awesome. I didn't bring long enough pants for our hike so Edson gave me these soccer socks to wear.

Start of week 7, week 6 summary

Ok this is going to be one of those lame catch up posts because I am totally behind.

During week 6 two very cool things stand out in my mind as worth mentioning. The first is that Semu killed a snake in the hen house at school. We are not sure at this point if it was a Black Mamba or a Cobra but we do know it was a very big snake and it ate 6 chicks.

Sorry couldn't rotate.

Yup, a chick from inside the snake.

The other item worth mention is the time spent with my class this week because we had an especially productive week. One of the teachers (who I will not mention) had decided that P6 is too slow for him and as punishment he would not teach them for two weeks. (On a side note this person is the exception, not the rule. Most of the teachers are impressive educators that I am honored to serve with. This type of behavior is being handled by Enoch and King James so I will not comment further). This gave me even more time to have my class all to myself. For English we began to work on our response letters to my class in Wisconsin. The Ugandan students loved reading the letters and we spent our entire first lesson answering questions they had about what the American students had written. For example: What is/are a Lexus, Wii, bacon, recess, waffles, Poptarts, Converse All Stars, chicken patty, AACE, ect. It was a lot of fun and a good learning experience. They continued by learning time-line format, making drafts, and then the final copy complete with pictures. I'm very proud of the work they have done. I should mention that I am also proud of their progress in math seeing as we completed an entire unit in that one week.

When we had about 20 minutes of free time at the end of a period one day I made up a little activity to keep us motivated to work hard in school. I will let the pictures (students) speak for themselves. I can't include the whole class but here are a few.