happy katima-new year!

I have a bigger, more important, blog coming tomorrow, but for now I just want to wish everyone a very happy New Year! And for those of my friends in Katimavik right now, happy Katima-New Year (because we all know everything in Katimavik is different than "real life.")

it's a katima-christmas!

I think this Christmas surpassed all of what we thought it was going to be. I thought everyone was going to be sad and down because we are away from our families, but it actually made us come together more. We spent the whole day cleaning and preparing Christmas dinner. Then we all went off in our own groups to church, which was really nice! Then we came home (the english people were home first) and had a mini-dance party and just a bunch of good chats. Everyone came home around 10pm, so we had our big Christmas dinner... tofurkey for us vegetarians! We then played the gift game my dad made for us, and opened our secret santa presents. Rasheeda was my secret santa and she bought me a beautiful mug with an M on it, a cute little recycled journalism-type notepad, and a really cute bookmark. Then Robyn and I opened our Christmas gifts from home at midnight.

Today was a little harder... we went and volunteered at a soup kitchen type lunch at the local Port High School. It was stressful, but I still enjoyed it because I liked socializing with the people who came.

Overall, it was a nice Christmas. I do miss my family though, they are coming on the 28th which will be really great! We actually leave on January 4th, which is my student's first day back, so I'm going to go hang out with them that morning before I go. That'll be a hard day.

olympic flame

I just wanted to make a really quick blog about what I saw today. The Olympic flame came through Port Colborne! It was really cool to see a community come together and be so patriotic. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, but I'll always remember it!

i'm running on empty but still running on

To state the obvious, I have been incredibly busy. Katimavik purposefully makes December the busiest month for us so we spend little time being sad about being away from home. To be honest though, we are all still sad and now we're stressed to the max as well. I guess Katimavik means well though!

This past week has been very hard for me. I've loved my job at Second Chance so much and have made some really good connections with most of my students there. I've been absolutely dreading to face my last day in that classroom, but it came and went, and I'm still in shock.

My last day was really fun. We watched a really lame National Lampoon's movie, then had a huge Christmas "dinner" (it was actually lunchtime) and then they all got to open their presents given to them by the community. It was so nice to see them so happy, that's probably my favourite part of Christmas... seeing people open their presents. I gave them all the letters I wrote and I think they all appreciated them. They all gave me a really sweet card, some personal letters, and a Port Colborne High School sweater! I looove it. It's huge, but so comfy to sleep in.

It's hard having to say goodbye so quickly to people you feel you've made friendships with. I almost feel like I haven't done enough yet, like I need some sort of closure to be OK with moving on. But I know this is also part of Katimavik, learning how to say goodbye, and I hope I'll be able to keep in touch with some of my students and possibly see them in the future.