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Saturday, December 25, 2010

Noheli Nziza (Merry Christmas)

Merry Christmas, everyone! It's probably 90 degrees here but we're doing our best to get in the Christmas spirit.

Last night we took over a local restaurant and had a giant game of white elephant, followed by a talent show (a time-honored PST tradition) and dancing. We had some fantastic gifts with very creative wrapping - American candy and Nutella purchased in Butare, second-hand t-shirts and ugly Christmas sweaters from the local market, Rwandan jewelry, apples imported from Europe and so on. The talent show was also pretty spectacular. There was a fantastic rendition of a Flight of the Concords song, some spoken-word poetry, and some traditional Rwandan dancing. I and my friend Genevieve performed a duet, "Angel from Montgomery," and she accompanied us on ukulele. Overall, it was a success.

The last day of model school was also pretty awesome. Since it was the day before Christmas eve, I decided to spend the entire class period teaching my students about wassailing. Then I taught them a traditional wassail song. They got really into it - by the end of the class period they knew almost all of the words and had the melody down. I wished I'd had time to teach them a harmony. There are lots of church choirs in Rwanda, but schools generally don't have choral groups. I'm dying to start one as a secondary project, but we'll see.

I'm definitely homesick for my family today but all of the PCTs feel the same, so it's not so bad. We're going to celebrate today by baking spice cake and watching Christmas movies at the training center. I hope you all are having a great Christmas back home and I hope it's cold!

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