The day I helped out at the local public school :)

In Brazil there is a massive difference between the rich and the poor, which is similar to other counties, however here the rich and the poor live very close to each other, sometimes just around the corner...

One of the things I agreed to before I left for Brazil was to go to school in my host country. My school is called Convivio and I’m pretty lucky because it’s a private school. The parents of the school pay monthly for their child’s education. However five minutes around the corner is a public school. It’s for the children whose parents can’t afford private schools. But it’s not like public schools that we get in e England. Most of the people who sent their children to public schools can’t even afford the basic necessities such as toothbrushes and toothpaste. So the local rotary and interact club (a rotary club for children aged between 12 and 18) decided to do something about it.

The week before the interact club and I spent a couple of hours making gift bags to handout at the school. The gift bag consisted of three toothbrushes, two tubes of toothpaste, a bar of soap and a bottle of talcum powder. We then tied red ribbon around the top to make the bag loo pretty :) we also had nappies to give to the local public nursery. By the end of the night we had made about 100 gift bags ready to give out.  The following Thursday I was driven to the school and met the principle of the school and the teachers of the classes we were going to hand the gift bags to. We lined the children up outside and made sure that every child had at least one bag. You should have seen the grins on their faces! They were sooo happy and soo grateful!! It made me happy to see them happy so I think it was time well spent :)