Let the Good a Times Roll

Hello Everyone!

It's us again! Wowow we can't believe we've just entered our last week here in Guyana, we're having a hard time wrapping our heads around the fact that this week is full of lasts.

On Tuesday, we did our first radio segment. It went so well and we had a great time interacting with callers and discussing healthy relationships and abuse. We were such a big hit that the host Frederick invited us to come in again on Thursday night and sit in on one of his programs. Stay tuned again this Tuesday night so you can hear us on the radio show!

On Wednesday, we went to Ruimveldt to finish painting the playground. we were happy to make such a colourful addition to the play yard. We also began cleaning and preparing one of the walls of the building to paint a mural. We plan to create an outdoor scene with trees and flowers, as well as writing a fun but inspirational quote. The kids are going to help us with the painting this coming week so it can be an activity we do together. We are looking forward to doing some good old fashioned finger painting!

On Thursday, we did our last lesson taught on TV as this week we will be interacting with live callers in our final segment. We had a heavy lesson as we discussed depression and suicide, but received positive feedback that we had dealt with the sensitive subject in relatable way.

That night we visited the Shaheed Girls Islamic Orphanage. All of the older girls at the Orphanage are our students at the Reyaz Business Institute- it was a really wonderful opportunity we had to spend the evening getting to know some of them over dinner in a much more relaxed environment. They are such a vivacious group of young ladies who welcomed us with open arms and much generosity. A special shout out to their house mother Shanty who treated us like family!

We had an emotional week teaching fall of our final classes at Chase Academy, but it wasn't a goodbye yet, as we will be proctoring exams for them this week and have a year end picnic planned for Friday. This past Friday we anticipated going to spend an afternoon participating in gym class with the Chase kids, but instead they caught us off guard with a surprise "thank you" ceremony... It was very touching, and there may have even been a few tears shed! Some of the students had speeches prepared, while others serenaded us in song.

We revisited the Anna Catherina Islamic Complex to give an "Intro to Health" talk to the youth group, as we hope to establish a regular teaching schedule with them next year. The kids and even some of their parents who sat in, were very keen to hear what we had to say, and showed much curiosity! We stayed and had dinner with the President of the complex, Hakeem Khan, chatting about ideas for next year- we're very excited to see what the future brings for this new partnership.

This past weekend was spent finalizing our last few lessons for this week and working on editing our mental health awareness commercial! We're ready to soak up every last bit of this final week... We've still got five awesome days left here in Georgetown, and for that, we couldn't be happier!!

Sending lots of love from 9 degrees north of the equator!

Anna, Maddy, Jesse & Ali