HFB
2017 blog
Feb
11, 2017
Yesterday, a day that began some 50
hours ago, we traveled from Seattle to Cape Town, students making special
arrangements to bring luggage to school and then trying to act like everything
was normal for the first four periods of Thursday’s goings-on at Roosevelt High
School. Gathering our things in the back of the school, we met with our parent
shuttle and said goodbye to Mr. Nolet, who I suspect is aching a bit as he’s
left behind.
The first leg of the journey to United
Arab Emirates was the longest in the lives of many students, arriving at a
summer time zone 12 hours different into the blazing opulence of the Dubai
airport—mirrored steel columns gleaming into enormous white space. If students
were fatigued by their 14-plus hour journey on the narrow seats of a plane,
they stretched out in waking awe in the elevator the size of a room descending
slower than the water of the indoor waterfall outside it, and they made quick
work of organizing a count-off system that will help us stay together and
efficient.
During the five-hour layover in Dubai,
we stayed at a hotel airport, straining on the bus but failing to catch a
glimpse of the famous Burj Khalifa. While waiting for guest registration, half
the students collapsed on couches beneath the light of a jeweler’s as the other
half merrily chatted. We ate dinner at the hotel, a gracious buffet of dahl and
meats and pickled vegetables. When I returned to my room with three hours left
before wakeup, sleep took me in a sudden hard assault and kept me down.
The final 9-hour ride from Dubai to
Cape Town on a full plane occurred in quiet darkness, all the shades down
against the African sun. Through the seat-back TVs, we followed the gaze of a
camera in the belly of the plane as it captured a world below us in a dry reds
and browns. But then we were there, walking into the airport; below us,
Bellville and Isilimela students in purple HFB shirts caught sight of us and
there was mutual jumping and calling. We were maybe fifty feet apart. But hugs
waited an hour or so through a customs line of a mostly all-white collection of
hundreds of travelers.
But then it finally happened.
And once together in the airport,
students from the three schools made quick work of getting to know each other,
clumping and chatting and filling up the next hour as the two vans were rented.
It was about 84 degrees outside. The mountains were there, in the distance.
When we finally boarded the vans with bins of school supplies, luggage and
students, we drove on flat land past low, concrete buildings in tans and yellow
and occasional splashes of bright color. The students in my van switched off
and let their exhaustion return for the twenty minute drive to Bellville High
School, a beautiful brick campus for an Afrikaner school founded in 1937.
Students were formally welcomed to
each other, they ate, and then they circled up in the courtyard and ran games
for themselves—or the Isilimela students ran games—involving dancing and naming
and choosing and running and laughing.
We returned to Langa for homestays
with the mamas, about a quarter of a mile from the Isilimela school itself,
which is across the street from shanty houses and corrugated shack shops. For
myself, everything was all of a sudden very different than the world I knew—what
to make of the poverty but also people walking in lively, animated groups, and
the children in their exuberance and poise? Poverty is no barrier to love and
community.
Students and the mamas were shy with
each other at first as trays of seltzer, candies and chips were passed around;
but as Mr. Moss paired mamas with their children, hugs were genuine, warm, and
lasting.
February
13, 2017
Today was our first day at Isilimela
Secondary School! Seattle students spent the morning putting finishing touches
on their HFB skit, which they
performed for three different groups of students.
But the opening assembly of the day
was a big step in understanding a very different schooling experience. The
entirety of Isilimela gathered in the large hall, packing the room with their
standing bodies. We were prepared for the sea of uniforms and even, perhaps,
for a congregating of the entire student body on a Monday morning, but the
event started with a multi-tonal singing from the students, led by a teacher
with a beautiful voice operating in low harmony with the clapping learners.
This was one unexpected event, and it had me questioning what was possible in
unifying the body of a school in America, who perhaps we can engage more
universally and emotionally through song.
Mr. Moss came on then and read a verse
from the New Testament and spoke about Paul, Jesus and love, which doesn’t puff
itself up, etc., as a prelude to welcoming the American visitors. He said, show
them your African love, love that treats strangers as long lost brothers and
sisters, hug them and give your most loving welcome. While I knew the hall became
a Church on Sundays, religion on school days was unexpected, and so was the
love, though we’d long been feeling it these many miles all the way from Cape
Town.
Finally, the principal stood with Mr.
Moss and told students not to stampede when classes begin because it’s
dangerous for the weaker ones.
Students practiced their timing, enunciation,
energy and their volume, until finally classes came in and pulled plastic
chairs from their stacks by the wall and prepared to listen. You can watch it on this link. We
teachers were proud of their creativity and performance. Students reacted
especially strongly to the Roosevelt skit during which Cavan threw a paper
airplane during class and blatantly cheated on a test—they thought this was
hilarious—and they also thought the moment during “Lean On Me,” when students
mime collapsing under a great burden, was very funny.
Isilimela students’ questions during
the Q&A period were also interesting. They wanted to know about foods, and
what American HFB students thought of South Africa or what they were expecting
or wanting to do still; but they also wanted to know what Americans thought
about Donald Trump’s election and how this has affected students’ lives, and
how he came to be elected without a majority of the vote.
After the school day ended, Isilimela
teacher Mimi (I’m sorry I don’t know her last name!) led all the HFB students
of the two schools in writing and sharing prompts. The last was to describe
ways you are privileged. I’m sure students, in addition to seeing and hearing
through the lens of appreciation and gratitude, heard the differences in the
kind of statements they were all making, but the kindness and love was a
binding universal tenderness.
February 14, 2017
Table Mountain and District 6
February 15, 2017
Table Mountain and District 6
February 15, 2017
Today was students’ first shadow day
at Isilimela. Afterwards, some complained of a boring day when some teachers
never showed up to class and others went through rote lessons copied off the
internet and read off paper and then re-copied by students from the blackboard.
But we also saw some chalk thrown and knuckles rapped and students made to
kneel for a period, which doesn’t sound so boring to me; and some students just
really enjoyed their classes, period.
My own first experience involved the
first period class of the English department chair. She was going over how to
write an essay, and the five types of essays. I taught it for her. I thought I
nailed it, actually, involving students in questions about purposes of writing
books or poetry or newspaper articles and how that applied to different genres
of essays and how the planning process was different depending on the process
and whether or not a writer had a strong sense of subject; I spoke slowly and
clearly and always asked about words I wasn’t sure if they knew; I made good
eye contact to assess understanding and asked questions and called individual
kids into the conversation. I made students laugh and also nod with serious
understanding. And by the end, I felt that students might even be excited with
ideas of their own about what they might write, whether they were approaching a
narrative or argumentative subject.
But the next period, the teacher
demonstrated her own process, which involved reading, with the students, off
the board, and having them finish the ends of her sentences. The language
learning involved this level of reading and vocabulary reinforcement, I was
told; and I too went ahead and repeated the things she had us chant. But by the
end and from the beginning, I was thinking of Paulo Freire and the ways I tried
to engage minds and many ways this process of repetition seemed to do less –
for the imagination and for thought, and even for engagement and skill. But
this is what I would see over and over during the day.
It was similar but farther behind than
Hungary, where the lack of resources such as available paper and copy machines
and books and workbooks means an entirely different pedagogy, and information
is transmitted through collection and repetition.
I went to the room of another teacher
who welcomed me like a king, conspicuously wiping down a seat for me in the
middle of the room at back, and then telling me he was going to act as though I
were invisible – which is the absolute opposite of what he ended up showing. In
every instance, he demonstrated his acute awareness and even nervousness about
me, apologizing for the way they were doing things, explaining how these
students were not natural to English, checking to make sure I agreed with his
pronouncements on conjunctive adjectives, which I couldn’t always do, because,
for example, I’d never used whence in a sentence before, though I knew well
enough and could explain whenceforth. He seemed entirely on his guard and
embarrassed, though his English was excellent, and in fact, he did make
multiple errors I was not very interested in telling him about: how would it
hurt students when he claimed that “nowadays” was more appropriate to say than
“in these days”? He kept me in his room through the next period, or at least
half of it, and we talked about race and Trump and African love and African
foolishness.
The final period of the day, I taught
a poetry lesson. I was trying to get in this man’s room. I’d heard students
were working on a lesson, and he wasn’t in there, because they were just
answering questions for the hour. But I wanted to talk to him first. He was
wandering around the halls. When I eventually caught up with him, the class was
half over, and I told him I heard students were answering questions about a
poem, and asked him if I could possibly help them with this. He said, Sure! and
walked me into the room, where I introduced myself and stared at the page for a
couple minutes while students waited. Then I went through, having students read
through stanzas, going through the words students didn’t know (no way they were
going to answer those workbook questions, based on what they didn’t know), and
then going through meanings with my full body and poetic self until I could
imbue the room with meaning. Then we’d go through the questions, which were
things like, why does the poet like the woman (because she’s a bronze beauty).
I finished 75% of the poem and 50% of
the questions by the time that half of the period was over. It felt satisfying,
but I was tired, too, maybe from having only slept four hours combined the
previous two nights and missing breakfast and lunch recovered through fruit and
power bars.
After school, Isilimela and Roosevelt
were joined by Bellville. I eventually led everyone in song, accompanied by the
guitar I borrowed from Mandy from Bellville.
Hot and worn down by the end.
For
the Shutterfly site:
Roosevelt students were welcomed into
Isilimela Comprehensive School today, shadowing a student until the very end of
school. They encountered classrooms relying on chalk and repetition, as
Roosevelt students came to understand two important aspects different from
their own learning: One, all classes are conducted in a language not spoken in
the home; two, multiple copy machines, libraries, textbooks, abundant paper and
access to computers changes the shape of teaching and learning -- with fewer of
these things, repetition is a way to transmit and absorb information.
It was also our hottest day.
Bellville joined the two other schools
for a couple hours after lessons were complete. Ms. Emery from Bellville put
students into groups mixing the three schools, and they began to prepare for
this weekend's retreat. We sang a few songs.
February
16, 2017
The biggest event of the day was
taking a ferry to Robben Island and visiting the cell Nelson Mandela stayed for
18 of his 27 years of captivity. Our tour guide had been a political prisoner
held in the prison, and whenever he walked into or out of one of the blocks, he
would slam the heavy metal door with his open palm. He was powerful, eloquent,
and spoke with quiet gravitas. In our first entry into Section B, where Mandela
had been held, our guide asked us if he knew why Madiba was such a hero. It was
because he united South Africa, the rainbow nation. It was because of
forgiveness. He sat at the table with his enemy and forgave him.
Students before the boat ride had been
abuzz with an article they’d been forwarded from The Roosevelt News: a Junior had written a semi-satirical, mostly
cutting column roasting the Senior class, and our Seniors spent a good amount
of time raging about the sentiments there.
But in light of what we experienced on
the island, this rage only seemed embittering. What was moving as we listened
to our guide share experiences of the prison wasn’t merely the injustice and relentless
physical and spiritual suffering described nor the strangeness we felt within
the thick, close walls; what was moving was that, as president, after nearly
three decades of such degradations, Mandela sought healing and love, and after
everything, made individual and institutional programmatic and personal
gestures of communication and forgiveness, actively teaching even those most
traumatized to recognize the humanity in everyone.
In a time when the United States has
become bitterly tribal, this message is the one I hope stays with our students.
Be honest about our truths and our pain, but be understanding and forgiving
also. When Moss tells students to be African and tells us this means welcoming
strangers, no matter who they are, like long lost brothers, he is giving us a
part of a key I hope our students take back with them.
Be African. Appreciate and love. Open-heartedness
heals the world, and most certainly brightens the soul.
February
19, 2017
On Friday, students attended six
Friday-condensed school periods at Isilimela Comprehensive School and
expressed, at the end of it in a debriefing session, confrontations with their
own privilege. One student was grateful she had water because it was so hot and
stuffy in the classroom, and then she looked around and saw she was the only
one who had water; another reflected
on how comfortable she is spreading her grievances far and wide, but the
Isilimela students, socked in as they are in hot rooms with sixty plus other
students, never complain, simply fanning themselves. Our students also spoke of
periods when teachers weren’t in the rooms, and the Isilimela students either
worked or didn’t work, but they stayed there in those rooms together; and while
the Roosevelt students were visiting, some classes took the opportunity to sing
songs to each other in the teachers’ absence.
For my own part, I was thinking about
the learning culture at the school. Students were quick to focus on their
teachers, and when they weren’t, teachers were quick to focus them, often with
quite stern reminders of what’s at stake. And what’s at stake are the multiple
yearly national tests, and especially the two part, three-hour-each, per
subject school leaving examinations in the final year, for forty-plus hour
exams before panels of teachers.
I visited six classes and four
teachers on the final day. The repetition that occurs during lessons has a
clear rhythm. Teachers check in with their students every couple minutes with a
do-you-understand-what-I’m-saying statement that is followed most often by a
Yes! or Yes, Miss. At the weekend retreat, I went over the signature statements
with Pumza Mush, and she was amused, recognizing the one I ascribed to her,
finding my observation probably true and funny. Her statement: Are you with me.
Mr. Zondi’s: Are you following, guys. Ms. Jaca: Ne? Savon? In the several
lessons I taught, I found I used a line, too: Does this make sense. Or: Do you
understand what I’m saying.
After school, we headed to the Melkbos
HFB retreat. Roosevelt, Isilimela, and Bellville students traveled separately.
Roosevelt, with an extra hour or so, stopped at a nature preserve on a white
sand beach and luxuriated on what was somehow a school event, feeling the skin
of sand break below our bare feet, Table Mountain looking extraordinarily flat
and table-like in the distance. It was no less impressive a few kilometers
down, where we met with the other schools.
Bellville and Isilimela teachers
carefully planned a program reflecting on privilege and prejudice. Very soon after
arrival, students journaled about stereotypes and a time when they were judged
according to false ones, and then discussed in buddy groups made up of four or
five people from the three schools. Then students were asked the still more
provocative question—especially for the Roosevelt and Bellville students—What
are you like around people of color in your everyday life? They were warned to
be honest, to be real, and not to be, for this moment, HFB. Students did not
need to share these entries, but hopefully they did some hard thinking.
The next day, this theme continued.
Students journaled about how they behaved around people who were not their
friends; they worked with buddy groups on questions having to do with whether
or not they behaved differently depending on the race of others in the room,
whether they were treated differently because of their own race, or whether
they had to fear people would ascribe their actions to the rest of their race
if they stepped out of line somehow. As for the latter, our students ultimately
hoped for more immediate debriefing and discussion or unpacking of things they
heard other people saying: the three to five groups represented in the room all
have very fraught, but very different relationships to race, and their experiences
discussing and digesting these relationships are also different from each
other.
In the same buddy groups, students
were assigned an art project—distilling the single word that best represents
the discussion, making the word three dimensional, and inventing and replacing
a single letter in the word on their poster. I didn’t understand the letter
invention prompt at first, but as so often happens, kids are smarter than
adults, and they not only provided new letters and shapes, but in the introductions
that followed upon completion, students demonstrated marvelously creative,
thoughtful and feeling reasons for their choices. They built sand castles based
on these words too—but perhaps they were even more interested in being on the
beach and in the water.
The closing exercise was each student
sharing a best memory, a challenge, and a learning, each student taking a pinch
of string while throwing the spool to someone else around the circle, until
there was an interlinking web of lines between every student. The line was then
cut into smaller strings which students could then gift as bracelets to their
new friends. Please do see the pictures, which reflect just a ray of this
experience.
Most students from all schools
reported Saturday night’s open mic to be their favorite event. Isilimela
students came prepared—with stunning songs, dances, skits, and most anything in
between. The time students spent on their own, playing, swimming, singing,
talking, and running down the beach, will leave indelible tone-memories, for
sure.
The final singing of “Lean on Me” was
the saddest, slowest one yet. Maybe it was the interlocking web that prevented
them from dancing and clapping, but it also may have been this: an end of a
weekend of vulnerability, compassion and affection, something precious, rare,
and unrepeatable.
February
20, 2017
Our students attended their first
classes at Bellville High School today, on a lush campus attended by many
people trimming hedges and trees and cutting grass and painting bathrooms.
Resources at the school far more closely resemble what our students are used to
in Roosevelt High School, but the culture itself is a far cry from what they
know.
Boys arrived in shorts and dark
knee-high socks, white short sleeve shirts with the school crest, vests with
crest and jackets, with crest. Girls came in identical dark skirts, short
yellow socks, white shirt, vest and blazer, with crests. All students brought
their books in school packs and sport clothes in school duffels. Today, they
also stood in lines for inspection: boys must keep hair above the ear, no
jewelry, no facial hair, socks pulled tight, shoes the right color and type.
Girls must wear hair in a ponytail if it falls past the shoulder, wear skirts
the correct length, wear no more than one earring per ear and only in the lower
lobe and it mustn’t shine or sparkle. Failure to abide by any of these rules
result in a demerit, 5 or 10 points, and if students reach 50 (and other
behaviors such as missed homework or tardy arrivals add to the tally as well),
they attend detention after school on Wednesday, and Saturday school for two to
four hours when they reach 100.
Our students rehearsed their
presentation for the first couple periods in the morning, learning to work with
the microphone and sound and lighting system in the auditorium. When Bellville
students filed in, they poured in, all of the 1300 or so students, sitting in
the aisles and on the floor before the stage high above them. They sat
according to age and gender, and as I found out later, this is a deliberate
sorting. Maybe because this was our students’ last performance and because
they’d done it enough times to feel comfortable with it, maybe because having a
sound system changed the way the crowd and the performers could feed each
other’s energy, our students put on their strongest show yet, with exuberance,
clarity and confidence.
The audience wanted to know how we
liked South Africa, how many periods we have in a day, and how America elected
Donald Trump president.
Teachers only had a couple minutes to
check in with students at the day’s end, but after shadowing buddies in
classes, a couple students reported to me that classes were more formal than in
Isilimela or Roosevelt. One said the school rigidly divided the school into
graduating classes, so that when she tried to bring her host buddy to where
other HFB students were sitting outside, the underclassman she was with was
loudly rebuked for encroaching on grade 12 territory. I look forward to hearing
more from students and experiencing more as I attend classes tomorrow.
Finally, I’ve been reflecting on what
it means to be an English teacher in Seattle schools. When I ask Isilimela
teachers what happens when they’re sick or unable to go to class, the class
just doesn’t happen; maybe kids stay in the room and do work; maybe they get
reassigned for the affected time. This is the case for up to two weeks of
absence, I was told. In Bellville, they started dividing the students of a
missing teacher into four groups, the first going to one class of the same
subject, the second going to another, the third going to another and the fourth
to a fourth: this adds only a few students (Bellville classes don’t have the 65
students Isilimela classes have), and they can keep up with the content.
But of course, this requires a shared
curriculum. But they have a national curriculum, and even national books. When
I tell teachers here that we don’t have a national curriculum, or even a state
curriculum, and in our city, even a city curriculum, there are shocked gasps.
Then who develops the material? And isn’t that a tremendous amount of work? So,
reflecting on what this means: I love the freedom of being able to choose my
own literature and develop my own goals and assessments and skills work. It
means I am nimbler in incorporating current and local events and that I can
work to my strengths, passions and interests; it keeps my imagination and sense
of purpose fully engaged. But yes, it also means the work is monumental. And
yes, it also means that the difference between a strong teacher and a weaker
teacher is more devastating. But would I give up that freedom to provide more
uniform consistency in student experience, and maybe more time for me? I’m
certain I wouldn’t willingly do so.
And are students better served by the
kind of discipline, attentiveness and urgency and yes, even fear, that’s built
into a system driven by huge national tests? It’s cheaper to school kids around
tests. And our own students, despite having more money spent on their
educations than anywhere else in the world, perform in the middle of the pack
on international examinations. But I’m not convinced that America’s schools
would gain more than they’d lose by falling in line.
February
21, 2017
I can’t speak much to what students
experienced in Bellville High School in these last two days. For myself,
visiting classes has been very different from visiting classes in Isilimela. At
Isilimela, I either observed class lessons or I taught those class lessons:
there wasn’t a single moment devoted to questions students might ask me, or
that I might ask students. But in Bellville, in every visited class, I only
answered questions. It wasn’t until the seventh period that I requested an
observation so that I could see what classes here might be like. It just so
happened that this seventh period was reading Macbeth out loud, and the questions, translations, and emphasized
tones were certainly familiar to me.
The rest of the day, though, I
observed Bellville by being observed, learning by the shocks and surprises what
things must be like in the Afrikaner school, or more generally, in South
Africa:
You mean your students don’t have to
go to school until 8:45? You only have 180 days a year and have 9-10 weeks of
summer vacation? Students can wear civvies (non-uniforms) every single school
day? Your students have to go to the same exact six periods in the same order
every single day for half a year, and then the same new six periods? You don’t
teach Afrikaans in your school? You teach Japanese and hand language for people
who can’t hear? You don’t have rugby, cricket, netball, or e-sports?
Students were also jarred by the third
type of safety drill I reported practicing at Roosevelt—the lockdown drill,
where we lock and cover the doors, close the blinds, and hide from possible
shooters.
After school, Isilimela students
joined us, and the three schools divided into their HFB groups to prepare their
final skits for the final gathering occurring tomorrow night in Cape Town.
February
22, 2017
A guide from Gugu S’Thebe took our
students on a tour through the neighborhood in which they’ve been living—from
the township’s start in the 19th century as a place to house migrant
labor to the relocations occurring out of Cape Town as a result of the Group Areas Act.
We learned about jail terms for people without
passes and bribes for immigrants dating women of the township, and we
learned especially about types and reasons for living conditions—the cell-like
houses for migrants, government block houses for the lucky, older ones for the
slightly less but still fortunate, and shacks in shantytowns, or projects, for
those our tour guide said were “just getting started.” We also walked by
privately bought houses, the Beverly Hills of Langa, including the small
cottages where the mamas live. Entrepreneurs open shops in shipping containers
on the sides of streets, and every shack has electricity and water if not wood
or contact paper floors, so all is provided, in seven square kilometers housing
150,000 people.
We returned to Gugu S’Thebe—an arts,
education, and community resource richly supplied with art and light and
workers who clean and guide and sell art by those community members trained
with pride and care to make art for visitors.
From there we rode vans to a
multi-school track and field day in a stadium. The singing and cheering were
exuberant and deafening—for hours—and whenever a school’s athlete won a race,
in shoes, or just socks, or just toe wrap, or in bare feet, all its students
and teachers would burst into enormous song and joy. The heat and noise
overwhelmed most of our students.
But the day’s tumult of emotions was
far from over, because we joined HFB from the other two schools in the gardens
of Cape Town, and there students ate a last meal together, performed their
final skits, and cried, hugged, and hugged, and cried; they wouldn’t leave and
wished they never had to.
February 23, 2017
Cape Point.
Ostrich. Baboons. Lighthouse. Penguins. Traffic. Braai with Mamas.
February
24, 2017
Later today we will board airplanes
and return to America. Final meditations on the past two weeks occurred in the
lush trees and foliage of the Kirstenbosch gardens at the foot of Table
Mountain, where students breathed in the sun and light and fragrances of a
green South Africa, the proteas and fynbos, absorbing as much of it as would
stay within them back home.
Because of this experience, I will…
For myself, I want to engage more of
my heart at school, though perhaps I do this already. The student and teacher
relationship shifts in an extended out-of-school trip, and when this trip is
also life changing for students, it shifts still further; and I enjoy the
feeling of my open heart, of the tenderness I feel in students’ vulnerabilities
and foibles.
I want to engage more of my heart
through travel and the joy and kindness of strangers, of being a host, of being
a guest, of exchanging dependencies and returning even the most ordinary habits
to newness.
I want to engage more of my heart with
these new friends. I want to engage more of my heart because of the unabashed
and sudden vitality of the people I’ve encountered and observed in Langa
especially, the wild joy of it tearing through the poverty and history of
racial violence that cements it deep.
Students reported brilliant, inspiring
reflections and goals, and the following are rough notes from their discussion:
Do more. Don’t let conversations
end—take in what we see and hear and do something about it. Interact more with
people I’m different from and be more active about making friends. Take more
opportunities.
We all talked a lot about privilege,
and I’m now disappointed with my self for wasting or not taking advantages of or
not fully appreciating the many opportunities that I have. I am humbled.
I want to take into my heart the
African admonition that we must treat strangers as long lost friends, brothers
and sisters. I want to remember that it’s worth it do all these things even if
it’s scary.
Be patient and let go of expectations—let
things play out and see where they take me.
Learn to rely on and open up to other
people more.
I’ve learned that physical things are
amusements are not nearly as important as the people around you, and you don’t
need much, if you have music, laughter and dancing. I want to give more hugs.
The trip humanized people for me,
people who’d previously been invisible. What struck me more than anything was
talking to Isilimela students who, despite their poverty, seemed equally if not
more happy than us; I learned there’s no reason for me to ever complain, or to play
the victim: like our new friends, I will boldly take on the world.
I learned how to be open to being
uncomfortable. I put up a front that I’m not afraid of anything. But I am
afraid. And this trip made me feel so whole and so love and so excited to see
what the world has in store for us.
Staying in a community with such
poverty but filled with so much life and laughter and houses painted in such
vibrant colors helped me to let go.
