Hey everyone, I haven’t sent out an email in quite some time now, but I have been really busy with lots of things. Weekly logs and other assignments for my co-op part of this trip. This week was the last week of my first placement. It was ok; I had to stay home on Thursday sick, with a bit of a stomach flu. Other than that I had a good week.
Friday was a difficult day saying goodbye to all those kids. I didn’t think I had gotten attached to too many of the kids, but saying goodbye wasn’t very fun. The leaders of the home thanked us and gave both me and Hannah a card. All of the children signed the card, so the card was pretty full of signatures. My time there was well spent, I really enjoyed it. I didn’t think that I had learned as much as I did, but talking with Mr. Kamphuis while trying to fix up my weekly log, I realized that I did encounter a lot of things that I learned to deal with. Some of the things were just being in a position of leadership to 20 young children while being at the park, and perseverance through the first couple of days when it was hard. A lot of the kids gave me hugs as I tried to leave the home on Friday.
Reyna, a girl I would play hop-scotch with, was apparently sad on Thursday when I stayed home sick. Again on Friday when I was saying goodbye, she was hard to find with a smile on her face like usual. She was so cute about it though, because she didn’t want me to see that she was sad, so I had to follow her around and grab her to get a second hug. I will miss seeing her everyday, though she did always beat me at hop-scotch. Amelia gave me a long hug too, I carried her around to say goodbye to some of the other kids while she was hugging me. I will miss those kids, but I will try to make my way out there again before I have to come home.
My next placement will be the hospital, which is in San Ignacio. I will be living off the base during my week, and I will be living with a host family and walking to the hospital everyday. I am pretty excited about this placement, because this is the one placement that I really wanted to be able to experience. Feeding into that excitement, were the girls who were there for the first placement. When they got back on Friday night, I was told that they were allowed to watch an eye surgery, neither of them did because they were grossed out, but I was totally stoked to see some of that. I thought that my mom would have been proud if I was able to see that, because I know that if she was able to she would have watched it. I will be living with another guy from the team, Nathan Lamont. He is from TDCH and is grade twelve. If I had to choose he is the one guy that I would want to live with from the team for three weeks, so I am pretty excited to be able to get to know him a lot better. He is probably my best male friend on this team, we connected right away at the TDCH&HDCH team meeting in at TDCH, and we were just right away friends.
So a couple of days ago, I had the revelation that I have not seen my house, or anyone that I would regularly see on a daily basis, in 25 days. I did not have this revelation in a time of homesickness, but in a time that I wondered why I wasn’t homesick at all. I finally came up with the reason that I am not homesick, and that is because I feel totally at home here. This really is my home away from home. I love it here, and I am ready to face my next 9 weeks here. I don’t know what is like at home, but here I really don’t get a lot of off time to just sit and think about what is going on at home to make me get homesick.
Seeing as this is starting to become a short novel, I am going to let you go. Hope this gets everyone up to date on what is going on here in Belize. Oh yeah, and one more thing, today it is 25 degrees Celsius here in Belmopan, and I believe that yesterday was warmer. Yesterday I spent the entire day in the pool, from about 9:30AM to about 4:30PM. In hindsight, I wish that I would have re-applied sunscreen, seeing as now I have a wicked sunburn. I just thought that I would let you know that it is really warm here.
Anyways now I am actually done, I will write again later.
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