Today was our final day working at Kapadzera school. I was really proud of our group since we really had a lot of energy today considering how rough it’s been with volunteers getting sick on and off. I videotaped our morning songs, so if I find a way to put that on here I definitely will. This school was great. The day went by so fast and Jay and I had such a good time with them. It helped that we had standard 8, which is the highest standard we teach, so they knew a lot of English. My favorite part of the day was at the very end when I was handing out trees to my kids. A girl named Girlbeta took the tree and said “thank you, Brittanie”, and I about burst in to tears. It was the cutest thing.

After camp, we came back and met up with the tailor who has been feeling much better. He made me some really awesome things for me and I requested a few more if he had time in the next few days.

Once the tailor had taken our orders, me, Chris, John, Sara, and Monica were taken to the Old Town Market by Lusungu and Jackie. The market was like a HUGE thrift store full of secondhand American clothing, shoes, and miscellaneous other items. It was amazing. We were finding Coach bags, American Eagle and Abercrombie shirts, and Merrell sandals (of course they tried to charge Monica 9000 kwacha for a pair of sandals which is like $55). I bought some fabric and John bought a pair of shoes for a decent price. It was mostly just fun to walk through! We also ran in to Guise, our area coordinator, so that was fun. He was laughing at us for trying to make good bargains (African vendors are really good at getting money from bargaining with the `azungus` -white people).

When we had left the market, Lusungu and Jackie had to head home, so the rest of us stopped by the market near our house, which has all sorts of neat wood carvings, paintings, and other nick-nacks which would have been fun to buy, but also quite expensive considering the prices they were asking for them! I ended up buying a few wooden things (contributing to deforestation!) and a basket for $10 which will have to be my carry-on.

John made us an amazing vegetarian shepherd’s pie tonight and the power went out as we were eating, so we did evaluation by candle light and packed our boxes for our final camp which starts tomorrow. Drew and I decided we would be teaching partners since we get along well in the house and we had worked together well with the teachers, so that should be really fun.

Also, last night we did a reflection where we wrote a letter to ourselves in six months. Apparently in six months they are going to mail the letters to us, so it should be really interesting to see what I wrote again!!

Four days until the plane ride home.. sad but also a relief. It’ll be nice to be in my own bed with clean clothes and clean water!!