Our final 5 days in Melut

To say that these past few days have been busy would be an understatement.  There have been many things to do, numerous functions to attend and over 100 people to say good-bye to.

Saturday was the GTC Graduation.  It deserves it's own post but needless to say that day everyone had a great time!

The graduating class of 2013

Sunday we skipped church in the morning and went out for lunch to the Ethiopian restaurant in town. We knew that Rachel could probably only handle one church service and so at 4pm we all went to the special 40th day funeral service honoring one of our GTC students who died in October.  According to custom the family had killed two cows and people had spent the entire day cooking for the meal we all enjoyed after the service.

Monday we woke up at 6:30am to "see off" the three students who were traveling back to Khartoum to be reunited with their families.  Then at 7am we said good-bye to five families who were travelling back to Mabaan County.  Imagine about 15 adults, 30 children, 10 suitcases, boxes of chickens and about 10 beds piled onto the back of a small-sized Mack truck.  I'd never seen anything like it.  That afternoon we were invited over to Deng Bol's house.  Deng Bol has been our Arabic language helper for the past 9 months and we had a great time together with his wife and son. :)  The food they prepared for us was delicious!

Us enjoying a meal together with Deng Bol and his family

Tuesday we attended a celebration for one of our GTC graduates in town.  Gabriel is the pastor of the Presbyterian church and he had invited us and our teammates over to his place at 4pm.  I had assumed his invitation was limited to our team, so when we arrived and saw over 200 people gathered I was a bit surprised.  There was a lot of singing, clapping, and dancing as the community celebrated Gabriel's accomplishment.  A big feast concluded this event as well.

Rachel playing in the dirt during some of the speeches at Gabriel's celebration

More food. :)

Tomorrow (Wednesday) we will be packing up all of our things, saying our final good-byes and Rachel will spend her last full day playing with her friends.  We're going to spend the night sleeping in one of our teammates guestrooms so that we don't have a lot of work to do on Thursday morning.

 

And on Thursday at 7am we will drive to the airport to get on a plane to fly back to Nairobi.  What a way to end our time in South Sudan!!!