As the SPIRIT project comes to a close, I wanted to write a simple thank you to the teachers of Cyprus.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised this isn’t really about one project.

It is about a lifetime.

Teachers have been changing my life for as long as I can remember.

Some of my earliest memories are of my preschool teachers staying with me after school until someone was home. If they needed to, they would walk me safely across the street to our apartment.

At the time, I thought they were simply looking after me.

Today, I realise they were doing something much greater.

They were loving a little girl who needed to feel safe.

In primary school, one teacher helped the quiet, shell-shocked little girl I once was find her voice again. She stayed with our class for years, watching us grow together until graduation. Last year I finally found the school where she is now a principal and brought her a bouquet of flowers that was many years overdue. She looked exactly as I remembered her—radiant.

Then, in secondary school, another teacher showed me what to do with that voice.

She stood beside me when I needed someone to believe in me. She defended me when I couldn’t defend myself, placed a pen and paper in my hand and encouraged me to stand before an entire school and fight for what I believed in. She has seen so many versions of me throughout my life and somehow loved every single one of them, never asking me to become anyone other than myself.

She was there on my wedding day.

If those teachers helped shape the person I was becoming, the remarkable educators I met through the Ministry of Education’s summer camps helped shape the educator I would one day become.

For almost a decade, my summers were spent learning alongside teachers who gave me far more than activities or lesson ideas. Long before any university degree, they taught me that education has a heartbeat. That relationships matter. That children remember how we make them feel long after they forget what we taught them.

As a child, I expected teachers to shape my life.

What I never expected was that they would continue doing so as an adult.

Through catechism school and, most recently, the SPIRIT project, I met educators who welcomed me into their classrooms and communities with remarkable generosity.

They trusted me before they really knew me.

They celebrated ideas that were still unfinished, challenged my thinking with kindness and reminded me that learning never really ends—not even for educators.

Some made childhood dreams come true by transforming classrooms into places of adventure.

Others quietly opened doors I never expected to walk through.

And then there were the teachers whose kindness had nothing to do with lesson plans at all. Teachers who, after long days at school, still found time to care for colleagues, children and even the stray animals waiting for them outside the school gates.

Moments like these reminded me that teaching is never confined to the classroom.

It is a way of being in the world.

SPIRIT gave me the privilege of working alongside many remarkable educators over the past few years.

For that, I will always be grateful.

But my greatest gratitude is not for the project itself.

It is for the teachers.

Thank you.

You have shaped my life far more than you will probably ever know.

If, through my own work, I can one day become even a small part of someone else’s story in the way so many of you became part of mine, I will consider that one of the greatest privileges of my life.

This article may carry my name.

But the woman writing it, is in so many ways, the work of many teachers.