Namuli Jewelry: Missing Miss America

Sadly, Miss America departed for her homeland-the Netherlands. Campus just isn’t the same without her. She brought so much to Rising Star. To say she was dedicated to the work and to the children would be an understatement. She was ALWAYS moving. If she was tiered she could be a little quiet (expect for when she would break out into random song—usually about loving whatever food she was eating, peanut butter or the Pina Colada song), maybe take a nap but then she was right back at it. I don’t recall ever seeing her angry. She brought over A TON of these amazing dutch cookies that I'm convinced were laced with some kind of addictive substance because they were the best things I have ever tasted. We ate them all. Literally all of them. I am going to miss her energy, her perfect amount of goofiness, her snorting laugh, her enthusiasm as she performed her roles as the Community Outreach (aka construction) coordinator, her adorable accent and her enthralling sincere personality.

Whenever I think of Claartje, I will always think of Carl the goat. I think I have mentioned this before, but one day Claartje was sitting on her bed when she got a feeling that someone was watching her. She looked over her shoulder to see Carl the goat just staring at her through her window. I guess it scared her pretty bad. She was telling us about it, and I was about to wet myself because I was laughing so hard. A few weeks later, Carl started following me on campus. I would turn around to look at him and he would stop, but then as soon as I turned my back and started walking again he was right in tow. Claartje and I had a good laugh about that. All this added up to that fact that I may or may not of been responsible for obtaining and printing out several pictures of Carl and strategically placing them in Claartje’s path for the last couple of weeks she was here. I put one in her bed, on the inside door of her favorite squatty potty stall, etc. The best part was that eventually everyone got in on it—we even got Milo, one of the local construction workers, to give her one. Of course she figured out pretty early on that I was behind it all, but I never completely confessed to it until her going away party—when I gave her a card made out of the last Carl headshot.

So I’m defiantly missing our Miss America. And it is hard because her leaving signifies the start of almost all the long term volunteers and Summer coordinators, minus Brookly, going home. I’m sure their replacements will be awesome as well, but we have officially started the end of a great team. The only solace I am taking is in the fact that I’ve always wanted to go to Amsterdam and now I’ll have a friend to experience it with. Even still, my heart is sad.

So I'm going to focus on pictures of funny memories with Claartje.

First up is this one. She wasn't really driving it, we just caught a ride on it together one Saturday in Mamallapuram. She was so scared, and cussing up a storm in my ear, and then apologizing all in the same breath. As soon as we got off she wanted to hop right back on and take a picture on it though. She always had me laughing.

One day she came into Brookly, Emily's and I's room so excited about the butterfly princess net she has set up over her bed. She insisted that we come and see it.

This was from when she and I were exploring the ruins at Mamallapuram one weekend. It happened to be the weekend of my Dad's death anniversary and I'm sure she had other options of things to do but instead she spent time with me--just the two of us, chilling around. I was so grateful for that because I really wasn't feeling like being part of a huge group of people that particular day.