This is Amie...

What do I say about this little girl who has stolen my heart. I've known this little girl since she was a baby. Last June when I was in Sierra Leone, she was really sick, so she came and lived with me so she could get better. While being her mama was quite tiresome, it was also one of my favorite weeks in Sierra Leone. She is currently staying at our childrens' home. Every evening when she sees me coming home from work, she runs to me laughing and giggling and gives me a big hug. She's a special girl and so precious. I am so thankful for this little girl. And because she is so cute, I had to share all of my favorite photos.

When she was staying with me

Such big eyes

 And a great big smile

"helping" me wash my clothes!!

 she loves school and is so smart

2012: What a year!

What a year it has been. This past year was a whirlwind of travel but I am so thankful for each of the places I was able to be and the opportunities that I have through COTN. I was able to share in several schools and Universities about Children of the Nations as well as visit another COTN ministry site in the Dominican Republic. Spent several months in Sierra Leone. My supervisor has given me the flexibility to work remotely which has allowed me to spend time with my family, good friends, and be back home in Colorado and soak up the sunshine. I'm thankful for so many great people in my life and thankful I was able to spend time with them this year. After 4 continents, 7 countries, 7 states, and over 50 flights, I look back at this year with a lot of fond memories (and lots of frequent flyer miles!)

January: Indiana with my family

Mid-January: Kansas City for a JBU friend reunion

(getting to hold cute sleeping babies while working is the best!)

February: Dominican Republic with COTN

March: Phoenix with some good friends and making connections to schools

(I really did get work done pool side!)

Mid-March: Colorado- so good being home

(My favorite park in Colorado)

April: Washington for staff meetings

 May and June: Sierra Leone
 (Here I am with the teacher team)

 July: London- had a layover in Europe with some friends on the way back from Sierra Leone

July: Ireland- visting a friend from COTN

 July: Back in England visiting good family friends 

late July: Back in Washington- my family came to visit

August: Back in Colorado

 September and October: Home again in Sierra Leone

November: Peru- 5th continent!

December: Christmas with the family

The numbers are in!

We are officially helping to educate 1,065 children. The numbers include our main Ngolala site which is Preschool through High School as well as our three feeder primary schools. Thats a lot of little lives that we are responsible to help make sure that we give them to best education that we can. 

Views from Sierra Leone

Wanted to share two pictures that I think sum up a lot of my time in Sierra Leone. The view from my classroom and the view from my house. 

I spend a lot of my time at school. This is the view from my classroom of Junior High students that I was teaching. On the right of the picture is the primary school. Almost directly straight ahead in the far background is our junior high. To the left is our new classrooms that we are building. We are in the process of building new classrooms because we have too many students and not enough classroom space. Our next building project will be to make a senior secondary school campus. It is exciting to see how much we have grown in the past couple of years. 

This is the view from my front veranda. I live in one of 10 homes. Nine of the homes are occupied by our children. The other one is for our international staff and consultants. I love sitting on my veranda and watching all that our children are doing. I love hearing their conversations with each other, I love seeing the younger ones play, watching them pump water at the well, and the best part when they come and sit on the veranda with me. In this picture they are "planting" or braiding each others hair. This is a Sunday ritual for all the girls. They braid their hair every Sunday and the older ones braid the tounger ones hair. Sometimes there will be a line of girls braiding each others hair.

There's a few views of my daily life in Sierra Leone!

Snake stories

I don’t like snakes at all. Spiders, no problem, but a snake . . . definitely afraid of them. I have been blessed that in a place that has lots of snakes, I have only ever seen one, until this past year. So let me tell you my snake stories of this year.

Story #1: I ate snake! And it was delicious. Now a dead snake, I don’t mind. Our center supervisor brought us a snake that he bought from someone in the village. He gave us some, and to be polite I tried it, not expecting to like it. But it was good. I really did enjoy it. It had a lot more meat on it than I thought it would, and it was a really good flavor. So now I can say I ate snake!

Story #2: The next story is not so nice. One night I was sitting in our parlour, with our construction consultant, Dave. The generator wasn’t working, so we were sitting in the dark with our headlamps on. All of a sudden I hear Dave yell snake and jump up. I froze in fear. Next thing I know, Dave has pinned the snake with our coffee table and is beating it on the head with my chaco. . .  all just a few feet away from my feet, which at this point I had managed to move onto the couch. I was thankful that Dave was there, because I definitely was not brave enough to do anything but sit there in fear. Definitely did not enjoy having a snake inside my house. Augh!!! 

Story #3: Our nursery students are much braver than I am. I heard a lot of commotion over at the nursery school and went to see what was going on. All of the nursery students were running in and out of their classroom yelling. I went and looked in the class and saw they had cornered a snake and were stoning the it. The students running in and out were getting stones. The snake didn’t stand a chance!

So those are my snake stories. Six years, one snake . . . two months, three snakes. I think I like the first odds much better!

And I'm off

Back to Sierra Leone! Tomorrow morning I get on an airplane to DC, Brussels, and then Freetown. I'm excited to get back to Sierra Leone. School starts September 10th and we begin with staff meetings on September 3rd.

sunsets

Had so many good sunset photos, that I felt like they needed their own blog posting. So beautiful

 The view from the patio of where I live in Washinton

 San Juan Islands, the view from our campsite

 Another San Juan Islands

If it weren't for the silly power line in the way, this would be perfect!

Outdoors in Washington

I feel like I was able to fully embrace my time in Washington and get out and explore all of the beautiful places that are there. Went hiking, kayaking, camping... lots of time to enjoy all the fun summer activities. Here are some pictures of my weekend adventures!

Alhaji

There is a little boy in Mokpangumba who is deaf. I wanted to work with Mr. Foday on teaching him sign language because I knew that Mr. Foday would take the time to teach it to Alhaji.
COTN wrote up a story about Alhaji and said it better then I could, so please go look at this link. It is a really cool story of the wonderful things that are happening in Mokpangumba. Here are some pictures of Alhaji learning sign language

Pinterest Inspiration

I'm not usually a very crafty type of person but lately I have been inspired by all the cute ideas on pinterest to make some new decorations for my room. They turned out well I think and I discovered that I have a new love of painting things. I also think that the clouds behind add a nice touch to the overall look I was going for!