Most of the kids are gone now. There are only three left in my group - Mo is leaving on Sunday, Carlota on Tuesday and Julian on Thursday... or thereabouts. He's going to travel around the US with his brother, so his exact departure date from the program and Pittsburgh is a little less clear. It's been interesting to watch their pictures on Facebook. I've seen lots of photos of rooms filled to capacity and the efforts to compress a year's worth of "stuff" into the two allotted suitcases. It isn't pretty!
I'm melancholy at the moment. I'm in the middle of asking everyone I know to please consider being a host family next year, and I have a few kids placed...but they are only names and pictures at the moment. I haven't met them and they haven't pushed their way into my heartspace yet! So, I miss the ones who are gone. I even miss the ones who are still here - kind of like I missed my son before he left for his freshman year of college last summer.
This blog thing is kind of funny really. Since I'm new at it, I'm not really sure what the "rules" are. I have no idea if anyone even reads it, or if that matters. Maybe it's more for me. A way to describe the ebb and flow (for lack of a better description, which, believe me I tried to come up with) of this work I do. I bet it's something like foster care. That's an interesting perspective actually. And I've had more than one host family tell me that they have considered being foster parents, or have been foster parents. So maybe that's it, really.
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We're just international foster parents! And I'm the case worker. Agh, doesn't help much. I still miss them.
By the way, if you are still reading this... I really need new host families. Interested?