Counting down . . .

It’s amazing how much I’ve learned and experienced in seven short weeks. Unfortunately, I’m already counting down my final days here, but doing my best to make the most of each one. I brought my laptop to school on Friday so I could show my students all of the pictures I had taken of them. They had so much fun looking at all of the pictures and I loved hearing them laugh and reflect back. They also enjoyed listening to some of the music I have, although they had never heard of most of it.

Friday night, I went out with the girls to celebrate one of their daughter’s birthday and just spend time with them outside of school. We took the little ones to Pizza! Pizza! and I secretly jumped inside because the place was a Lucian Chuck E. Cheese’s! No, there weren’t any electronic games, but you could still buy little toys, popcorn and snowcones as well as play on the huge jungle gym and jump on the two jumbo trampolines while waiting for the pizza. I’ve heard my students talk about this place and they often write about going there in their essays.

Wanting to spend as much time with my host family as possible before I leave, I woke up early on Saturday to bathe, get some work done and get out by the shop to see what was going on. I know Christmas is right around the corner, but Lucians sure take celebrating to the extreme. By noon, almost everyone already had a few drinks in them and was laughing and singing along with the radio.

I didn’t stick around long enough to see what time the gathering dispersed because Annabelle and I planned on spending the afternoon at Pigeon Island with her daughter and a friend. A hot spot for weddings and other events, the park is a beautiful historic landmark scattered with ancient war forts, jails and canons. We climbed to the top of the hill – a piece of cake compared to Gros Piton! – and were able to look out over the entire northern part of the island. Annabelle highly suggested I return here for my own wedding, so start saving your pennies now! ;)

As the start to the many good-byes I will have to say in the next week, the principal of the Monchy Primary School invited me over for lunch with her family on Sunday afternoon. The meal was delicious and the company was warm and welcoming. She has a beautiful house which overlooks Rodney Bay, so when I wasn’t out playing with the kids and the five new puppies, I was enjoying the view.

For one of our last hurrahs in the classroom, the students and I decided to have another dance party, but this time we wanted to make it official. Four students were chosen to be the judges and I handed out slips of paper with numbers on them to create the order of contestants. We had a great time playing “Monchy Idol” and the comments from the judges were priceless!

This whole good-bye thing is going to be much harder than I thought, but I guess that just goes to show how influential these people have been on my life. All of the teachers planned a going away dinner for me on Monday night and it was fun to relax and share stories with them outside of our usual school environment. I still haven’t quite gotten used to “Lucian time,” but for a dinner that was scheduled to begin at 7pm, I was quite surprised when we didn’t sit down to eat until 10 o’clock!

Parent-student-teacher conferences went really well today and I found it quite interesting to meet the parents of my students. It’s funny how similar the students are to their parents and a lot of their behaviors obviously come from home. Unfortunately I won’t be around to see if any of the improvements that I suggested during the conferences are actually made, but I hope to keep in touch with Ms. Hall and hear good things.

All day, I was excited for my parents to get here and I can’t wait to show them around school and my home life tomorrow. I’m sure my adventures with them as I wrap up my trip will be just as exciting as the past seven weeks.