Friday was more goodbye-ing to my classes. Friday was the last day of school before summer break, and although there were only two class periods, I had English classes during both of them. We played an English board game of mine in both classes, and afterward both 1-1 and 3-2 gave me more sweet farewell notes. I was really impressed with some of the 1-1 notes. They’ve only studied serious English for about three months, yet some of the kids were able to string together more complex sentences. How sweet!
After both classes was the hour long cleaning period. On the first and last day of each trimester, the school has an extended cleaning period in which the students do things that get pushed aside for the trimester: washing windows, intense weeding and gardening, cleaning out the cobwebs from the corners, etc. I haven’t met anyone who enjoys this extended cleaning period, but it’s just a thing that happens in Japan.
After that was the closing ceremony. The Vice Principal told me that I would give my speech at the end. For an hour and a half all of the students and teachers sat in the stifling hot gym sweating as speech after speech was made. It was over an hour before I was called to the podium to speak. I gave my speech in both English and Japanese, and (surprise, surprise!) I cried. While it was a slow, tearful goodbye, I really lost it when two of the best 3rd grade English speakers presented me with a bundle of flowers from the student body and read me the cutest, sweetest, most heart-wrenching message in both English and Japanese. Then the students lined up shoulder to shoulder and made a tunnel for me to walk through, smiling and clapping as I did. HOW COULD I NOT BAWL LIKE A BABY AT THAT POINT IN TIME!?!?
I went home that day with a full bag of goodbye gifts. That night I met back up with the teachers for the farewell party for me. It was a lot of fun, and I got to talk to the teachers in a way that I rarely get to do on a daily basis. They presented me with a nice bottle of champagne, a beautiful fancy fan, and a hand made scrap book. That really got me. It was such a personalized gift with so many memories and cute pictures of everyone that it (surprise, surprise!) brought tears to my eyes! The Japanese teacher made it, and I thanked her again and again, telling her what a perfect gift it was!! The math teacher told me that he could be my Japanese brother, and my VP told me that I was her American daughter. So much love!!!
Over the weekend we had to say goodbye to Krista and Mollee as they headed home. Our little Kuma-gun family has officially been fractured. Sad day. I already wrote about the BOE farewell party, so I’ll skip to last night’s eikaiwa class. It was my last class with adults. They’ve been a great class! Last class period I told them that we’d be cooking and gave them three options of what to make:
1) cheese fondue
2) southern down home cookin’
3) Mexican food
They went with the down home cookin’ because they thought it sounded good, so we made meatloaf, mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, and a veg blend. As we were prepping things up, one lady started to peel the potatoes. I told her that she didn’t have to. I don’t think that the Japanese eat potato skins because she looked at me as if I had told her that I eat babies. We finally compromised that if she scrubbed the skins hard enough, they would be suitable for eating. We had two ovens and three burners going, so the kitchen was ridiculously hot. Ian had beads of sweat on his forehead, and the bottom of my shirt was wet with sweat. Icky! However, it was all worth it because the food was great, and I was surprised at how much they put away!! They were uncertain about the gravy, but after they tried it, they agreed that it was delicious. Bringing comfort food to Japan….hurray!!
After we had stuffed ourselves silly, I gave them their goodbye presents, and they gave me mine. I gave them cookies in a jar (they were really confused by this) and some spices. They gave me a bunch of traditional Japanese things like a set of chopsticks, miniature hina (dolls), and a furoshiki (cloth wrap thing that can be tied in different ways to make different things). The oldest lady in the class, Itsuki, even gave me an additional package and told me that it was money for my trip. It was 10,000 yen!!! ($100) How sweet!!! As we were leaving, I gave them each a hug, and Itsuki started crying, so I hugged her again and told her that we would see each other again and she should come to America. It made me realize how much we have affected each other’s lives. She has always been a motherly figure to me, and I guess she considered me a daughter.
*sigh* That’s all of the goodbyes for now. I’m really not looking forward to next week whenever we have to tell those closest to us, our Kuma-gun family, goodbye.
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