Miss Kate you are the Beast! I will Miss you!

This is what one of my students wrote on a goodbye letter to me. But then he asked me how to spell the word best. And there is a huge white-out mark through the middle of the word which is written on yellow paper. It is wonderfully ironic when a student says :" Miss Kate you is goot teacher (not a typo)."
That is right folks it is time for good bye projects in school. And I am having each student age 10-18 write me a letter on colored paper with a box marked off for where their picture will go when I develop it. The lettes are all finished and in a binder, they are soooooooooo cute and I had to pat myself on the back for thinking of this. I pained me to get rid of the work they had done. This is the perfect way to keep something from each of them.
The way in which I am getting rid of most of my stuff or my "volume" as I have come to call it, is burning. I had amassed a lot of envelopes and parcels and boxes (thanks everyone) and magazines and random paper what have you, Peace Corps manuals, old clothes etc. And it all went up in flames this past weekend. It is a very easy metaphor so I am not even going to go there. But it was a beautiful day and I was out all day with people tending their fields, building fences and my neighbor to my right was gutting a goat hung by its legs from a laundry line. It was all very kathartic (sp). I have been reducing in volume by giving stuff to the school, the hospital, friends, the second hand shop in Ternopil etc. It is really amazing that I have gained so much phyisical stuff over the past almost two years of living in my apartment. I remember aquiring most of it, little by little and never thinking about the need to get rid of it some day. I am bring very little back with me, a few clothes as it really wouldn't be appropriate or comfortable for me to travel home naked, a few books, lots of pictures, a sleeping bag and back-packing back pack etc.
This weekend I am going to say good bye to my cluster mates and my oblast mates at a party in Ternopil. It will be an action packed weekend. And the last time I will be in Ternopil in the forseeable future. I keep noticing that I am doing things for the last time here: whether it be teach, buying sunflower seed oil or seeing a particular view. I know that there is blue sky, fields, onion dome churches, rivers, sunsets and forests everywhere in the world. but these ones are now special to me.
A teacher in the teachers room yesterday asked me: "what are my impressions of Ukraine after two years?" And what came out of my mouths as a suprise as I had never really intellectualized it before but I said: "When I came here this was just a place on a map, now it is my home. It is very special to me and I have great affection for this place and these people." That got me a lot of smiles and its true. When I first learned I would be serving in Ukraine I had to search for it on a map now it is as if these place and things, sights and feelings have taken up physical space inside me.