My Last Day

Yesterday was the last day of my internship and although I was anticipating difficult goodbyes, the day completely surpassed my expectations. All day I was waiting and hoping for one of my kids to act completely immature, preferrably starting a fight or disrespecting me in any way, to make the departure a little bit easier. Instead I got 80 kids on their best behavior, hundreds of questions of when I will be coming back, requests to stay, and an afternoon-long party...the moral of which being that if you were interested in seeing a grown man cry last Friday around 4:30, Venezuela Street in Quito would have been a good place to look.

When I got to my internship, Julio was in a really really awful mood. When I asked him about it he wouldn´t talk to me and just said that he hadn´t slept well and was worried about his exams that day. When he was standing alone later that morning, my co-worker Elena told me to talk with him. Julio paused for a second before he looked up with teary eyes and said, "Por qué no puedes quedar con nosotros? (Why can´t you stay with us?)." This interaction was repeated several times throughout the day, most notably with Narcisa, Gaby, Gustavo, and Jesica. The difficult day culminated in a party for Dario´s, one of my co-workers, birthday and my departure. We had a three big cakes and treats of all kinds in addition to music performed by my boss and his music class and speeches by some of the kids. When they gave me some of their cards, I read the first one to find, "We wanted to give you a universe of stars but since we can´t, we gave you our smiles." After that I just stared firmly at the wall, waiting for it to be done. When I thought I´d escaped it all with a more or less dry face, I said goodbye to Myriam, my closest co-worker. We hugged and as we were both starting to tear up she whispered in my ear, "No nos olvides Net (Don´t forget us)." And thus commenced the falling apart of Nate.

Without care or fear of sounding cliché, these 4 months in Sol de Primavera have really been a life-changing experience for me. Working day after day with such inspiring kids and co-workers has had an enormous impact on me and today I felt completely lost (even though it was Saturday and I wouldn´t have been there anyway) knowing that quite possibly, but by no means for sure, I will never see them again.

Also, as I near the end of my blog (for this adventure anyway), I want to thank everyone from the US, Czech Republic, India, Ecuador, Egypt, Indonesia, Argentina, Poland, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, France, Jordan, Portugal, and Singapore who has been reading. Just to creep you out with the wonders of Google Analytics (a program that tracks from where people have visited the blog) a little bit more, thanks also to readers from South Dakota, Minnesota, Nevada, Missouri, Iowa, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Wisconsin, Alabama, Florida, and NewHampshire.

Coming on Tuesday: Tena and the last goodbyes