Farewell celebration

As it is now the final countdown to the end of my placement, I decided to hold a small celebration at my house for a few of the people I have worked with more closely over the last year. It would also be the last opportunity for Jane, Hetty, Margaret and I to spend time together before Margaret flies home on Saturday 25^th, so also a good chance for some girlie bonding time.

Similar to wedding invitation dilemmas, was who to invite and who to leave out, with 85 head teachers that I have worked with plus all the people at the district who pop in and out of the office almost daily, it was easier to restrict the numbers and stick with only those that I felt particularly close to. I made small invitations in Kinyarwanda and handed them out two weeks before hand as I was going to be working in Kigali for most of the next two weeks. In typical Rwandan style, people did not bother to actually read the invitation and because everything is always done with very little notice, at least two different lots of people thought the party was the Saturday before!!!

At any training that we do, the Rwandans love any of the energizer type activities that we introduce so we decided to make the theme revolve around children’s party games. This was a great success, with games like Pass the Parcel, the chocolate game, pin the tail on the Rwandan cow and some team balloon games but the overall favourite was - pass the orange from chin to chin, that had them all in fits of laughter and strangely enough the oranges all disappeared at the end of the game, of course they are considered to be a bit of a luxury.

 Inevitably there was some speech making which turned into an opportunity for everyone at the party to stand up and introduce themselves, how they knew me and how sad they were that I was leaving, I did not appreciate just how many “best friends” I had made. There were even a few tears (from one of my favourite head teachers!) and I had a real lump in my throat as I thanked everyone for coming and how much I had appreciated their friendship over the last 12 months.

As darkness started to fall towards 6.00pm most people took their leave and we were left with the hard core so that Margaret and I could demonstrate a “Gay Gordons” and get a few people to join in which was then followed by some of younger lads giving us a demonstration of Rwandan dancing, which they love doing.

All in all, a very successful way to round things off, with lots of happy memories and pictures to accompany them.