On Friday both teams woke up, ate bread rolls with a selection of spreads and a bowl of fruit and got ready for the last day of their projects. The book bus left at 7:30 and travelled to the same school they attended on Tuesday which consisted of 26 students - all of various ages and abilities. Along our way to the project, to our surprise we saw the children along the road who were on route to a farm for a school day trip out. They had planned to hitch hike their way there so it was lucky we came along. We picked them up in the bus and travelled to the school to collect everybody and then took them all to the farm in our bus. When they arrived, we played a few games, read the "Going on a Bear Hunt" book and then got stuck into reading with them and making bear masks and completing the word searches we created by hand. After this, we showed the children our "about me" picture books and asked them to draw a portrait of their family (la familia). Finally we were lucky enough to go on a real bear hunt through the farm and visit the exciting lava tunnels nearby which we called the cave. We could not have asked for the perfect fininsh! We took the childrenback to the school to say goodbye to the children. After giving out a few of our presents and shedding several tears - the team said "adios".
We returned to base to complete our final evalutation of our project. Overall we are very happy with what we have achieved in just a short time and hope that The book bus volunteers continue to support this much needed work. It really saddened us to see no story books in any of the schools we visited us and warmed our hearts when we saw how much the children were enjoying our story telling.
Team Conservation group finished the final touches to the restoration of the mangrove fores and reunited with some of the students from our early conservation project, together we were thanked formally by charities and a member of the local government for a presentation ceremony. This was all in celebration of National Mangrove day in the Galápagos. Later the students took us to their school so we could see their talent contest. Walking through the town we saw a Galápagos festival which was a nice way to say goodbye to the Santa Cruz island.
When we all returned to our hotel, we finished packing and prepared for our two hour speedboat journey to Isabella island. Upon our arrival at Campo Duro we settled into our luxury tents (they had mattresses!) and then we tucked into a delicious meal prepared by our hosts; chicken or vegetables with rice alongside a lentil sauce.
Maeha and Ellie
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