Goodbye Hanoi

Yesterday was our last day of Practicum! Yeah! It was a very long week for all of us. I stayed up til 2am doing lesson planning and printing out handouts for my 7am English class. That last class was the best class I had this week. More on Practicum in a later post. We're now packing our luggage to be brought to a temporary storage in Hanoi because we're moving on.
This morning at 5am, the Laos teachers and the Cambodia teachers went to the airport to fly to their respective countries. Yesterday, we had a dinner celebration for the completion of our Wheaton Certificate (still have take home exams and papers due at the end of the month) program as well as saying goodbye to all the teachers who are moving on to Laos and Cambodia this morning. Over the past few weeks of living, training, and teaching together with them, we have gone through a lot of new experiences together and have grown closer to one another, leaning on one another in difficult situations. We've had opportunities to share with one another the reason for which each one of us ended up here and the different paths we have been on to get to this point. Many lives, many stories, and many memories...
Only the Vietnam teachers are left now, but we'll see the others again at the mid-year conference in January. Today, some of us are packing our stuff to be brought to a storage place in Hanoi. Tomorrow, all of Vietnam teachers will take a 2-hour bus ride to a hotel in the small city of Hoa Binh, where we'll spend 5 days together planning and casting vision for our upcoming teaching year. There is very limited dial-up access to internet there, so you won't see us online for this coming week. We may not be able to check email much at all.
At the end of this gathering, each Vietnam teacher will depart to his/her respective location in Vietnam for our year of service. We'll be bused back here to Hanoi on Friday 8/29 and our school in Haiphong will send a van to pick us up and take us to Haiphong on the same day. Internet access in Haiphong will also be very limited, so we'll try our best to keep up with the post entries and emails as much as we can in the next coming months. We hope to post more pictures when we have time and when the internet works. All for now.