Our Leaving Parties

Sorry its taken much longer to post these than we thought. We've been busy getting back to our life's in the US and have neglected putting up our final blogs.

Our last day at Mantay . . . It was a regular day of changing diapers and wiping noses. Another volunteer from Spain started recently, so we felt better that we were not leaving the kids alone.



We gave Sandy, the nurse, a picture album of the children and spent $400 of the donation money to buy crafts that we hope to sell in the states. We figured that this would potentially be a way to showcase their talent as well as get some recurring revenue for Mantay.

The parents surprised us by giving us each a book that they made and inside each mother wrote a thank you to us. It certainly was sad saying goodbye.



Well, we thought that we would surprise the kids at Inti and really show them how much they mean to us by bringing an Inti Cake, cards & pictures for each kid (Yuliana cried when she read the card), a scrapbook, and MacNcheese for the afternoon kids, but they certainly topped us.




The professors made us lunch and gave us each presents.


The kids had a dance party for us and a few of them had dances in honor of us. Then, many of the kids got up and talked about us and how thankful they were for everything that we did. It certainly was humbling and took all of our strength not to cry to hear these children get up and speak about how thankful they were. We had learned so much from these kids over the past 3.5 months.



Then, we were blindsided by Mavel - one of the girls that all of you have helped out. She is incredibly shy and it took a bit of time and a few ice creams to really get her to warm up to us. Well, she got up and sung a song to both of us. There was no holding back the tears at that point.





Her mother showed up afterwards with scarfs, t shirts, and empenadas for Jackie and I to show how much she appreciated us. This must have been close to a month's salary, which for her every single penny goes straight to food, so this certainly blew us away that she would be so generous.

There was certainly a good deal sadness all around and it was difficult to say goodbye, but Jackie and I know we certainly will return soon.