Last Day of Placement

Posted by Shawna on June 22nd, 2008

I’ve been sitting here for a while thinking about what to write. I don’t know where to start because so much has happened. Our last day of placement was on Friday. It was one of the hardest days of my life. It didn’t hit me until mid-afternoon, when I realized I may never see some of these people again. I didn’t get to say goodbye to a few people, but we are hopefully going to Ramotswa to surprise everyone this Tuesday.
The hardest goodbye – Thapelo. Although we only spent a short time together, we’ve become such good friends. Our last day was one to remember. They surprised us with about 50 youth and staff and we had a nice celebration. I obviously couldn’t hold in my emotions and cried a bit (almost the whole time haha). The things they said to us were amazing. Thapelo spoke to us and it was so hard to handle. He explained that I’m like a sister to him and he doesn’t know how he’ll cope with losing me. Up until now I didn’t realize the impact we’ve made on these individuals, but I do now. We have learned so much from each other and it’s going to be so hard for both sides to part. I’m hopefully going to see Thapelo one last time before I go to make sure he’ll be ok and that we can sustain our friendship.
The trip is almost over, I can’t believe it. 1week from today and we leave – Eish!! We have really accomplished a lot. We developed a manual for Emmanuel Counselling Centre, Kagiso, WUSC and Project Empathy that explains ECC and the Educational Outreach we did in Ramotswa. We’ve been working hard on our documentary and have a lot of interviews planned for this week. We’re also going into two high schools in Gabarone, where we will show the manual we developed and will speak to classes about HIV and AIDS.
“This is Africa” – is what one of my coworkers said, and I’m realizing now that the experience is almost over.
I’m going to leave it at that for now because I’ll be writing a large summary of the entire trip in a week or so!

Posted in Botswana, Country