Hi everyone!! Well here we are…10 days from the end and it’s completely unbelieveable to me that we’re almost done!! It is a bittersweet feeling for me because I have absolutely loved my experiences here, the friendships I’ve developed with the girls and the wonderful South African people and culture we’ve gotten used to and I will truly miss a lot about Cape Town, BUT on the other hand, I am very excited to return home to the life I’ve known for 21 years with a new appreciation for it! Let me tell you..I will not appreciate a bagel with creamcheese and a dunkin donuts iced coffee as much in my lifetime as I will the morning of Monday, December 15th (not to mention my family and friends of course)!!  

This week has been pretty laid back with beautiful weather (another thing I will seriously miss about Cape Town). 

Let’s see…Monday I finished up clinical at Tafelsig Clinic, which I believe I wrote back in my last posting on here.  It was sad to say goodbye to the sisters there but I got some pictures to bring home with me!  They were truly wonderful there, always welcoming and eager to know more about our country every week during our tea break and lunch breaks!  It’s amazing how nice people are here, not saying people aren’t nice at home, but it’s a very different feeling here.  Everyone is so warm to us from the second they meet us.  There is never an awkward feeling, and as much as we stick out like sore thumbs wherever we go, especially being white Americans and in our clinical uniforms at the clinic which is about as opposite looking from the patients as we can get, I have never truly felt uncomfortable which is amazing to me! 

Tuesday I had my last day at Gatesville Hospital and said goodbye to the sisters and staff nurses there too.  Hopefully, a bunch of these people will be able to attend our farewell dinner next Monday, the 8th, because we have extended invitations to all of them.  It will be a really nice dinner with everyone and will be a good chance to sincerely thank everyone for making our experience here so fantastic!  I think Dana and Carolynn Z. will be speaking on behalf of our group and I think they will do a really good job.  I will probably be crying and am glad I won’t have to speak because those two things don’t ever really go well together.

Wednesday is my day off so I decided I needed some R&R and spent my day laying by the pool.  I felt the need to take full advantage of 1. the weather 2. having a pool because I never had one growing up and 3. for all the nurses, synthesizing a little Vitamin D while I’m at it haha It was so nice!!  Luckily, a lot of people were done with their clinical hours as well, so there were 11 of us out there all day!! It was SO much fun!! We put on Christmas music, which was very weird considering we were singing about snow and a fireplace half the time, but it still got us in the Christmas spirit!  Also, I am currently reading Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, which is really good so I read a couple chapters while laying on the pool raft! For anyone interested, the book is a very worthwhile read!! I am really enjoying it!  Then, we had post conference last night to discuss our week of clinical and to finalize plans for donations to ThembaCare and other things like that.  All 16 of us ordered take out food and sat around talking.  It’s a very relaxing way to end a stressful week of clinical.  We all also talked about wanting to do a day or two of clinical on a pediatric unit at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in January right before we start the spring semester because we feel it’s really important to get the experience at home in addition to our experiences here.  Hopefully the people at the school of nursing can make that happen for us!!  Then we received a bunch of work that is due Monday and right after we return home which leads me to what I am going to do right after I post this…work on all of those assignments! It’s 10:45am here so I have a whole day ahead of me to get a lot of it done which is nice…unfortunately though, it’s gorgeous outside as usual! I might have to take a break this afternoon and soak up a little sun but we’ll see if I deserve it or not! haha

Tomorrow we have some hospital visits scheduled in addition to a visit to the heart transplant museum, because the first heart transplant was done here in Cape Town 41 years ago yesterday actually! It will be a packed day, but will be really cool I think.  I’m very excited!!

This weekend I think we have plans to do some last minute Christmas shopping Sunday and possibly the beach or something like that for Saturday! It’s so weird to think it’s our last weekend here!! I can’t believe how fast it went by!!

Well, I hope all is well back at home!! We will see everyone so soon! And thank you to everyone for staying in touch and supporting us all semester!