Secunda feira (Monday) & last day in Curvelo

(Gilles is writing and Britt is checking the grammar)

Monday morning, we visited a cachaça distillery. Currently the distillery is not producing cachaça since they produced enough last year and their stocks are full. Neverthless, it was an interesting visit because the friendly owner explained us the entire manufacturing process from the sugarcane plants to the bottle ready to sell. Drinking cachaça around 9 a.m. isn't the easiest thing to do but we enjoyed it ;-) Once more, as everywhere, they offered us food...

During the afternoon, we went to a project for children in Curvelo initiated by the Rotary club of Curvelo. The objective of the project is to avoid that children hang around on the streets after school time while their parents are still working. In this poor suburb of Curvelo the risk to end up in prostitution or to start using drugs is high; especially for these children coming from non-educated and poor families. The center was created to avoid this as much as possible. We had a great time dancing and playing with the 25 children and the people working there... After the GSE programme, Ilse will stay in Brazil for 3 weeks and will spend one week in Curvelo again to work as a volunteer and give english courses and dance classes to these children.

In the evening, we presented Belgium and ourselves in the Rotary Club of Curvelo. We felt a bit emotional when they sang the Brazilian national anthem. We could read the lyrics of the anthem on a screen in Portuguese but also in English. We also received gifts and at the end we enjoyed the musical slideshow of the pictures taken during our stay in Curvelo. What a surprise !

Back home, mum & bro gave me more gifts...it was so cute. Such good memories to take with me on the road... I spoke with mum for the rest of the evening. She showed me her picture albums of her family 15 or 20 years ago...It was very interesting to see and hear because it is exactly this that enhances our understanding of the people we are meeting. It was also great to see that my mum was a real pionneer because she started making scrapbooks 20 years ago. It's during these kinds of moments that you can really feel the Brazilian people, their habits, their way of life and you begin to understand the roots of the country. Our journey will last 1 month in the region of Minas Geiras in Brazil...the main goal of a such long journey is to understand thoroughly the county, the people and its culture.