Farewell Party and Red (Read) Beans and Rice (Writes)

Here are a few photos for the farewell party SVDP-ALC had for me. (Naturally, the nuns still taught school on that day as well as set aside some time for a party. I finished up some paperwork for AmeriCorps, as I recall.)

In the photo we see the poster of positive things the students did to improve their lives and their community since Hurricane Katrina. (Jennie and Ruby made the poster, but I took most of the photos ... And ALL of the photos came right from this blog, so you can scroll down and read all about these cool things we did over the past two years.)

Then we see a photo of Sr. Kathleen helping Sr. Silvia. We see a photo of lots of great foods. We had fried catfish, red beans and rice, bread pudding, real French bread, deviled eggs, little meatballs, and lots more, and soft drinks. The students and the nuns supplied all the goodies.

Then we see a photo of Sr. Lory next to a statue of St. Joseph. (Both Sr. Lory and Sr. Kathleen are with the Congregation of Sr. Joseph.)

Finally, we see Ruby and me. Ruby, as you recall from our blog, does lots of wonderful writing and portrayed Sojourner Truth in our International Women's Day event at SVDP-ALC. The other students gave me a farewell card with their comments about me on it (it was all good, yes! thank you), Jennie wrote a wonderful message, and spoke it at the party. (She also has public speaking experience with her many poems and essays published and her report on Sacagewea for Internationa Women's Day) ...

But what about that statue Ruby and I are holding which she gave me??

Well, that is a New Orleans chef with a cooked plate of red beans and rice. She gave it to me for the school in honor of my work with our new Literacy AmeriCorps student magazine called Read Beans and Writes which you can find online at www.literacygno.org , the website for Literacy AmeriCorps New Orleans and the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans.

Wow! what a great award! Over the past many months our students at SVDP-ALC have cooked up a kitchen-full of essays, poems, short plays, and original food recipes to help fill both of our issues of Read Beans and Writes, together with student writers from the other adult education programs in New Orleans. Plus, many of our students had published writings in the student writing section of AmeriWord magazine, the newsletter for Literacy AmeriCorps, and of course for our blog -- which you are reading right now. Also, two of our students had essays published in the Change Agent magazine from Boston, Massachusetts about Hurricane Katrina. (In fact, Jennie had two essays published there.)

So, we did a lot of student writing at St. Vincent de Paul -- ALC over these past two years.

Thanks again, everyone

--Adrian