To Sarah

This blog has been filled with stories. Stories of this trip, of our team, of our show, of the crazy things we see and do. I have a different story to tell you today.

I went to elementary and junior high school with a girl named Sarah Lopaschuk. I always liked Sarah, but then, everybody did. She was in a few of my classes throughout grade school, but I really got to know her in junior high. We went to separate high schools, and I think I saw her three or four times from the end of junior high until now. After high school, she went to school in the land she loved; Australia. On Thursday, she and two of her friends there were killed in a car accident.

Sarah had beautiful naturally red hair. She had a few strands that were white, and she didn’t quite know why, but she always found them funny. She was one of those people with a perma-smile, but somehow it never felt fake. You could always approach her without fear of scorn, rejection, disdain, or anything but genuine interest. There was always a new story about her many pets. One day she came to school talking excitedly about her new sugar gliders. I don’t think any of us knew what a sugar glider was, but she and wasted no time telling us all about the three she had.

She brought a strange lunch to school one day. It was a tortilla smothered in peanut butter wrapped around a whole banana. Eunice and I thought it was hilarious, but she insisted that it tasted good. So Eunice tried it and started laughing uncontrollably. Though this was not an uncommon occurrence, she just couldn’t stop laughing, and she began insisting that I try it. I did, and promptly started laughing my head off. From then on, Sarah’s weird lunch was known as the "laughing burrito."

When I was in junior high, the internet was a novelty to most. Sarah and I discovered email and found it to be great fun to email each other with the most postscripts possible. Our emails would end with something like this:
P.S.
P.P.S.
P.P.P.S.
P.P.P.P.S.
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P.P.P.P.P.P.S.
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etc.

Sarah was athletic, and always beat me in running. Always a high achiever, she pushed to get herself into the IB program at Ainlay High School and got her IB diploma. I remember so many goofy times; making peanut butter cookies and chocolate cake for our English teacher, making up songs, making fun of teachers, saying "ew" whenever someone mentioned the name of a certain boy we didn’t like, playing baseball at lunch, playing in the park, the huge German egghead man who would talk to himself in the park, dances, reading YM magazines at lunch hour, and those funny smiley faces with huge mouths and tiny dot eyes that we always used to draw. I was fortunate enough to get to see her when she came home in December, before I left for this trip. She was full of stories, smiles and laughs. When I heard the news, I thought of us who knew her in junior high; Joyce, Eunice, Mei, Sally, Andrew, Paul, Janita, and many others. My little blog can never do justice to who she was, but I know that we were better off on this world having known her. She made our days bright.