Counting down...

Thank you again to everyone who has sent sympathies and condolences my way.  The loss of my Bams is still very raw (in fact it's the reason I'm still awake and writing this post); she's never far from my thoughts and I miss her every day, most especially at night.  What I wouldn't give to "boop" her cold, wet nose just one more time...But my days have been filled with both the usual work & additional preparations to leave C-town, and my wonderful sitemates have been amazing, keeping my evenings filled too.  I welcome the distractions.

So here's what I've been up to:

 I had a dinner with Bujin of LEOS to say goodbye (and introduce her to Andi, a 1st year volunteer), which lead to an invitation to lunch that weekend.  So here I'm saying goodbye over said lunch with some of the women heading up the new secondhand store (to which I donated many items).  The store will help fund her women's empowerment programs.

She gave me a nice Mongolian picture and Mongol boot.  Really gonna miss her tireless passion.

 I also made a visit to the new APDC facility.  Here Munkhzul is explaining some of the classroom activities.

 Some of the new equipment.  They have all manner of therapy and diagnostic tools now.

Thought this was goodbye, but it resulted in making plans to get together the following weekend at my house.

 At my apartment this weekend.  They are presenting me with wine and a cross stitch hand-made by a mentor parent (someone who has a disabled child and volunteers to support other parents with a disabled child).

Love these ladies so much!

 School's been busy too.  The aimag English Olympiad had even more drama than usual this year.  :(  And General Exam prep is in full swing. Here, I'm reading words for a Spelling Bee at my school.

 9th, 10th and 11th graders participated.

The 1st and 2nd place winners along with my CP Jagga who coordinated the whole thing.

 On Friday in my final (aahh!) 5th grade English Club we made paper chains.

 They're going to have an Olympiad-style competition next week and I move the following Friday so this was our last lesson.  I wanted to do something new and fun for it.

Each link had a letter of the alphabet and corresponding vocab word which they then had to sting together in alphabetical order.  Learning English is soooooo much more fun when it involves crafts!  It was super cute hearing them sing the alphabet in parts over and over, making sure their chain was correct. <3  Sure gonna miss these kiddos!

Have a couple more goodbyes to say in the next 12 (omg!) days, and a few more things to wrap up before embarking on the next phase of my service.  Really excited for our COS conference, see my cohort all together one last time, and to get to Darkhan & start PST.  But for now, it's one day at a time.