Formal and Graduation

Dear people who read my blog,
I can hardly believe that it's been over a month since i've written in this thing and i still have to cover stuff that happened way back towards the end of april/beginning of may.
so i'm only going to try to talk only briefly about the formal and graduation.

here we go. the formal :)
it was the friday night before our apologetics class started and everyone dressed beautifully. it was different from the first formal because by now everyone knew eachother much better than we did then. we had so much fun just eating and talking together and then each table made a toast. although all of the toasts were good, none were quite as memorable as danilo's. For background, Danilo is originally from Brazil and had all sorts of trouble with his visa that he had to work on all year. so danilo stands up and with a sad yet courageous look on his face he begins to tell all of us that his visa problems couldn't be resolved and that he had to leave the country immediately and was going to miss the last 2 weeks of school and graduation. since all of us love danilo, a bunch of people started crying. but then he admitted that while his visa was denied, he was able to get permission to stay long enough to graduate. this brought cheering and a slap to the face from jessica.
other than that short sad spell, the night was very happy for everyone. after dinner we took lots of fun pictures and then did some colonial dancing.
here are some pictures:

the food

the ladies

everyone/ my friends :)

lish, tat, olivia, me

me and my beautiful roomies :)

now on to graduation.
after 2 great weeks of apologetics, it was time to graduate. families started arriving early in the week, and while it was nice to meet everyone's families again, it was definitely an extremely time for us students. you see, after spending 9 months always being around eachother and doing everything with eachother, we had become like a family of our own. and as more biological family arrived, it only sunk in the fact that our student family was about to be separated for an indefinite amount of time. one thing i remember about that weekend was how very thankful i was/am that my JHBC friends are all my sisters and brothers in christ and even if i never get to see them again on earth, i'll still get to spend all eternity with them praising Jesus :)

the events of the weekend went something like this:
friday- i dont fully remember. nothing super spectacular. i think i packed, and i think there was some colonial dancing.

saturday- that morning pretty much everyone whose families were there went and explored the town. that night we all ate dinner together. then the girls were whisked away for a quick surprise tea party where we talked about the value of community and fellowship and we all got these adorable little mini tea cups. then we all ran over to the classroom where everyone watched the slideshow of pictures of everyone throughout the year. it was awesome. i think we danced later that night as well.

sunday- the big day. it was wonderful and horrible all at the same time. it was a lovely ceremony with great speeches from Cort, Aimee, and Danilo, and great music and singing from Christina and Jessica M. but it was also the end of our schoolyear, and thus, horrible. we took so many pictures and used so many tissues. after the service, we all ate lunch at the church and said goodbye to a few students.
the rest of the day was spent packing, enjoying a few more hours spending time together, saying goodbye, and one final night of colonial dancing.
it was one of the saddest days of my life. but i guess that's kind of a good thing, because it just shows how fantastic a year i had in jackson.
monday morning bam, lish and i packed up super early and drove to meet lish's parents in town. i cried almost the whole way to the bagel shop, but after that i was able to move on a bit and focus on having a fun roadtrip with my friends.
but before i go on to the roadtrip, here's some pictures from graduation:

Pastor Don giving me my diploma

me with sunshine and brett. they're my friend tatiana's parents who adopted me for graduation weekend because my parents couldnt make it.

me, tatiana, olivia, and lish

me and my wonderful roomie/hairstylist heather

this post has gotten really long, so i'm going to move on to another post to i write about my trip from wyoming to illinois. which is kind of fitting if you think about it. stuff that happened in wyoming in this post and stuff that happened between wyoming and illinois in another :)