Packing and Goodbyes

Tuesday we were going to go shopping but as we'd been to the shopping mall on Sunday and Monday we decided we'd had enough of shopping and I was happy to sunbathe while Catherine started to think about her packing and sorting out the rest of her house before leaving. We had a walk up to the children's nursery where Catherine has been helping out and teaching some English to the children of the students and staff. The kids were all very keen to point out their pictures on the wall and tell me the words in English for some of the things that they had drawn.
The rest of the day generally consisted of me lying in the hammock reading! We had a brief dinner and went upstairs for the evening to see Erika, bake brownies and eat them with ice cream and watch a film.

Wednesday and the packing really started, Catherine pulled everything out of cupboards, drawers and wardrobes onto the bed in a huge pile and then produced two bags to fill. I took one look at the pile and the bags and decided the best thing to do would be to take the larger bag and use it to pack my things in and let Catherine use my suitcase. Somehow (and I put this down to my superior packing skills) we managed to fit everything in - almost, monkey only just made it. I did manage to roll and squeeze things into tiny corners, every bag and shoe had as many things packed inside them as possible. The suitcase was almost entirely full of presents and Brazilian things to bring home for people with a very small bag for clothes. The rest of the clothes were then taken up to the girls dormitory to be distributed.

Catherine had invited people to pop down to the house around tea time where lots of people came to say goodbye. We thought it was then going to be a fairly quiet evening and as we sat in the house at 10pm having out nightly cup of tea we heard some noise out of the window, a little knock on the door and then a guitar strumming. Opening the door there were about 15 of the students all singing goodbye to Catherine - again it was so lovely to see how much they were going to miss her.