I´m writing this blog entry in the living room of my new host family´s home in Samambaia. We´ve finished our portuguese classes in Gama, and now Dani and I are working with the church in Samambaia. Tommorow we start teaching our first classes. We´ll be teaching English and Music classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and spending our afternoons helping at a local school. My portuguese is still at the point where I have some trouble communitcating with people, so trying to teach kids and to understand teachers will probably be... it will be a new experience for me. Right now, it looks like we will only be in Samambaia for a month before we go to Ceilandia, and then changing each month after that. I don´t know when the change was made from spending two months at a time in each place to one month, but thats the way the churches have our schedual set up right now. I think (and I think that the team agrees with me) that it would be better to spend the two months that we have in each town back-to-back, but it doens´t look that that will happen right now. Tommorow night we are going to Betty and Otis´s to watch the electron results live, and we will talk to them about it.
I enjoyed Gama alot and was just starting to get settled in, but its time to move on again. I am looking forward to getting started with the classes and with the other things that we came here to do. Plus, it will be nice to start getting more real-world portuguese practice, since no-one in my house speaks English very well. My host mother, Marisneide, lives with her three sons, her sick mother, and her brother. We live in a house about a block away from the church. Dani´s house is a just five minute walk from mine.
We spent some time with the youth group after worship Sunday night, and they are very freindly. We played charades, which is suprisingly more difficult when you don´t speak the language.
I will try to post some pictures of brazil soon. I left my camera at my house in Gama, but hopefully David will bring it to Otis and Betty´s tommorow.
About Me
- Dan Root
- My name is Dan Root and I´m from Springs PA. I am participating in the Radical Journey program through the Mennonite Missions Network. After a month of orientation in Chicago, I am spending the next nine months in Brazil working with the Mennonite churches in the Federal District. I will then be attending Mennonite World Conference in Paraguay in July before returning home.
5 comments:
sounds like you have been keeping busy! Good luck with your classes
Hey, Dan....how did classes go today?? thinking of you and Dani...
My Internet is finally fixed, I think, so now I hope to visit your blog regularly. I'm especially interested in hearing about your upcoming experience teaching English.
Happy Birthday, Dan!Hope it has been a great day for you! It is most interesting to read about your experiences in Brazil. I'm sure you'll do a great job working with students in both the English and music classes.
You didn't mention anything about pets in your host parents' homes. Last week Dawn, Larry and Ben had quite a time with their yellow lab. They had boarded her while they went to Pittsburg to a Steeler's game.She was groomed before coming home and evidently she ate a towel, no less! She became very ill and the towel was discovered by x-ray! A couple of days later now, she is just fine, but Daisy came very close to having that towel surgically removed! One has to wonder what tastes so good about a bath towel!
Grandpa is very busy these days raking the multitude of leaves that carpet everything around here.
We'll be eager to hear how things are going when you move on. Bye for now. With love and prayers, Grandma and Grandma R.
Isn´t languauge learning fun? And frustrating? The people here say Portugese is butchered Spanish (apparantly, though, the Portugese speakers say the same about Spanish being butchered Portugese). It´s too bad you don´t get to stay settled for very long. But you get to meet lots of different people this way. According to the prevailing mindset of most Mennonite conferences I´ve attended, this is the most fulfilling work a Mennonite can do - Networking ;)Have fun!
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