I feel like my heart is breaking. In one week I will be heading to the airport. My time here is coming to a close. Tomorrow I will go to the last workshop with my students. And I will tell them farewell. I am so very fortunate to be handing off my work to a wonderful couple who will carry on "hivyo hivyo" (just the same). And as much as I know I am making the right choice, I am sad to say goodbye to so many people I have grown to love over the last three years.
I'm just a little part of their journey in life- someone who cajoles them into sharing about school, struggles to communicate my expectations for them & figure out how best to support them, reads over their school reports, lectures them, and hopefully encourages them to be their best self. Some of them I've met almost every two weeks, others only a few times each year. Some finished school and I've lost track of where they are now. Life keeps moving. For others, I know it's a great loss of someone who cared about them, who listened to them, someone who seemed stable, who is now disappearing.
Tomorrow I hope to remind them of why I came and hope they remember not so much my words but what I'll try to tell them from my heart. They are loved. I hope they can believe in themselves and be proud of who they are becoming. I believe in relationship - in a God of love. I hope my believing and being here and trying to help them have a better future does in some way do that.
My words seems inadequate and incongruent. I feel like I've been part of a great blessing these past years - a time of growth and challenge and summing it up is like trying to hold the ocean in your hands.
... here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;
with grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)... - E.E. Cummings
Tonight I leave my heart to be carried by the great Love of God - that which is holding stars apart.
