On a High Note

In the rush of preparing to leave and the anticipation to return home for the holidays, some exciting and deserving events in December didn't make it to the blog. Better a month late than not at all!

At the beginning of the month, we reached the culmination of our new student selection process which began way back in July. It started with reviewing applications and narrowing them down to forty students to sit our exam. We interviewed the fifteen who received the highest marks on the exam and ultimately chose three recipients. In the 2012 academic year we’ll be adding two girls and one boy, Karen, Jessy and Andrew, to the KF family. We are all thrilled to be welcoming them to Grade 8 at their new schools next week and I know the older students will be quick to take them under their wings.

In the second week of December I received my first visitor in Lusaka. Fittingly, it was Jane, the Princeton in Africa Fellow in Nairobi, who has probably heard more than anyone about the day to day details, frustrations and successes of my first six months in Zambia. It was great to be able to show her everything in person, and she was in town for an ideal weekend. On Saturday she accompanied me to the KF Mentor’s Luncheon (more on that later) which I had been planning for some time. She was indispensably helpful, setting up projectors, taking pictures and entertaining the guests. She may have been on vacation, but she was more than willing to work and I sure was grateful. She saw other aspects of my work, as well, including working all day at coffee shops and sorting out the occasional car breakdown. We also squeezed some fun non-work activities into her visit such as a night of slam poetry, Sunday morning Frisbee and a projector movie night. It was a great way to spend the last days before returning home for the holidays.

The Mentor Luncheon is an annual event put on by KF to thank the individuals who volunteer their time to mentor our students. Event planning is always a little hectic because nothing seems to ever get fully sorted until the event is underway. This was a particularly special luncheon as it was an opportunity to congratulate our first class of recent graduates. While we might not have had time for all the activities planned, I think overall it went really well. The mentors caught up with one another and their students and we all enjoyed the presentations from the three schools honoring the graduates and from the graduates themselves. It was also a chance to look back and marvel at how much this first class had grown, how mature they are now, and how KF has impacted their lives. I couldn’t shake a sense of envy of the KF staff members who have been here since the beginning and watched this process firsthand. Between all these exciting goings-on and the fact that I had a car again, I felt like the first six months of the fellowship really ended on a high note.

(KF Students at the Mentor's Luncheon)