A vida

So, I´ve pretty much got it made at my host home here. The family I live with is great! They are very gracious towards my oddities and incesantly offer me delicious food, almost always containing, or paired with, cheese. (Hannah: I´ve been talking up frozen bananas, and last night I snuck into the kitchen, chopped two up, and put them in the freezer. They don´t seem angry. Perhaps I should offer them some.) I spend most of my time with the mother of the family, whose name is Véra. She´s a retiree in her sixties who takes care of many people outside of the traditional American nuclear family. Véra has been learning English for many years and is anxious to improve, so we usually talk in our respective second languages all day. It helps us both to practice speaking that with which we are least proficient, which is good, but we don´t get to actively dialogue much in either set language. Maybe we should start doing English days and Portuguese days so we can really interact in one language at a time!

The house is lovely. I have a room with air conditioning and more drawers than I have stuff to fill them with. I can hear lots of fun noises out my window: televisions, people talking, people singing, dogs barking; occasionally I hear a horse walk by. As in most Latin American countries, the house has a wall surrounding it. I´ve been spending a good deal of my time so far within these walls. I asked Véra the other day if she knew much about Buddhism and proceeded to explain roughly to her the story of the young prince Siddhartha who lived locked up in a palace all his life, until one day he fled from the palace walls. His experiences thereafter became the points of departure for Buddhism. I explained to Véra that I feel a little bit like Siddhartha, living in a palace behind walls and not knowing what is outside. The upstairs of this palace has a library with computers, which I am using now. They even have a treadmill on the upstairs balcony which I used for the first time yesterday! There´s a motivational parakeet in a cage right above the latter part of the treadmill. He/she keeps me in check and chirps in horror every several seconds as I jog. Yesterday I was sweating buckets right as Véra´s son and his wife came over for lunch, then took a frantic shower and shuffled in right as the meal was starting! I thought Brazilian people upheld the Latin Amerian traditition of arriving late for engagements--not so much; the were a solid 45 minutes early.

Today is an important day. I will be going to the Catholic University in the afternoon to meet many students there and introduce myself. I will also be meeting with officials from the NGO I am hoping to work with, which offers after school educational programming for seleced at-risk kids in the community and tries to transform them into active citizens. I am a little worried about these meetings--I´ve been having a lot of difficulty understanding what people are saying to me, especially when I am with a group of people (I´m pretty sure I´ve already agreed to a lot of things accidently. Yeah sure, I´ll call you! Okay, I can play guitar and sing at that thing!) I want to make sure I am on the same page as these organizations. I´m also not very confident in my ability to teach English well. Fernanda, who could pass as my sister and is quickly becoming a close friend here, speaks great English, having lived in Ilinois for 3 years. The job market is very tight here, though, and she doesn´t think she has the fluency required to get a position. I think she´d do a fantastic job! Sure, I speak English, but I am at a loss to explain many of the features of the language, and I am not going to have as much insight into my students as she would, having grown up in this area. But, I have books to help me! And Jesus! And I´m free, so it´s not like the NGO is losing anything by letting me shuffle around all foreign like and try to teach English!

Mercy.

May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;
establish the work of our hands for us--
yes, establish the work of our hands.
Psalm 90:17