on saturday, we helped at the NAC´s festa de familha (family party) and it was awesome!!! aside from learning a VERY expensive lesson about taking the bus from home to the creche (just a $50 taxi ride later and i made it to the creche on time... don´t ask! lol) everything else went great... we were asked to bring some ´american´ food items to share with the kids and their families so we decided on making brownies to share... i found a very simple recipe online for ´one bowl brownies´and we bought all the ingredients we needed at the mercado central and a local market... i thought we were good to go, but nope! i nixed the brownies after attempting to bake 2 different batches of these brownies :( poor jaka´s mom probably wanted to kill us for burning something in her oven, because the brownies didn´t turn out right at all and instead they rose about 4 inches high and were soupy in the middle... bummer. they overflowed onto the bottom of the oven and filled the kitchen with a charred sugar smell... yuck. but, nick, diego and leo made a guacamole--admitted, not exactly typical american food, but it´s about as texan as they come!-- and paired it with doritos since there was not a tostada chip to be found in all of belo... i also brought koolaid mixes to make and share, but there were so many drinks there that the kitchen staff decided not to make the koolaid and saved it for sometime in the near future. :( in any case, the program went really well and the kids did an outstanding job... this was their first time speaking in public, owning and developing and creating and carrying through with a program, and they were all so proud! one of the local benefactors of the NAC was also in attendance and she was so proud of how far the kids have come since she last saw them! at the end of the program, diego, nick, leo and i got to show the kids and their families some ´american´ dances like the cupid shuffle and the electric slide... the kids went nuts. ´twas a good day!
this is the creche packed full with guests of the kids... parents, siblings, friends... PACKED!!!
the menores (little kids) doing their dance routine... they were so cute!!!
me & a little girl named lorena... she is a handful, but i think she just likes the attention! haha
nicki thanking the kids, parents and guests for coming to their first family day at the creche... when she talks, everyone listens :)
the rest of the weekend was rather short since we were at the creche early saturday, however, i ended my saturday by going to Mass with two of my sisters at their family´s church nearby... they have since moved out of the neighborhood where the church is located but they still consider it their home church... much like i still consider st. john neumann back home as my home church, i guess... anyway, i was so moved and overwhelmed at Mass that even in a country thousands of miles away, the readings were the same that my family and friends were reading back home in the states, and Christ was present in the Eucharist. seriously, just overwhelmed, it was amazing... i´ll try to post my reflections on the readings for the day soon, so you´ll have a little understanding of where i´m at right now... in short, Mass was just what i needed!
on sunday morning, my sister bianca, my host mom sayonahara and i set out at 7 AM for feira hippe, a street fair-artisan/crafts sale type thing in the middle of the city... hundreds of exhibitors come out every sunday to sell their hand-made wares of furniture, food, clothing, jewelry, toys and more... literally everything you can think of! we had a good time for the most part, except that bianca was pickpocketed at the end of the day :( bianca and my host mom made some purchases throughout the morning without incident, and i even bought a pair of running pants and a running shirt, and literally as bianca was making her last purchase and waiting for her change, she noticed that her bag had been sliced open on the side and her wallet had been stolen! we walked a few short blocks to the downtown police station and spent the next hour and a half filing a report so that bianca could freeze her bank cards and get new identification... as we waited for bianca´s report to be done, i counted 12-14 others who had been robbed in the same manner (and some more aggressively assaulted face-to-face)... it was quite an eye opener about maintaining awareness of myself and my belongings... all the things we learned in training were flashing through my head and i thought about how it could have been me that had been pickpocketed... literally, in the blink of an eye, bianca´s wallet was gone and neither of us had seen a thing and we were right there the whole time! sheesh.
this is feira hippe, tons and tons of local vendors selling everything you could possibly think of...
some of the most beautiful handmade jewelry i´ve ever seen!
one of those real-live statue guys that i got to take a picture with me. ha!
on a more serious note, i learned that on saturday some people i know had been robbed at gunpoint on the street while walking from one place to another... two teenagers popped out of a doorway and demanded their money, phones, and the girls´purses... somewhere in the confrontation, as the robbers were leaving with the stolen items, they fired off a shot in the air... it was pretty scary and everyone´s shaken up a little bit, but thankfully no one was injured, or worse... surely it could happen anywhere, but it seems scarier when your safety is compromised and you don´t speak the native language... things are more confusing, more hectic. just another reminder for you all to please pray for our safety while we´re here in brasil.
today, segunda-feira, was a rather awesome day as mondays are ´dia livre´... the one thing we did differently was actually go into the favelas guided by nicki, one of the directors of NAC, and met some of our kiddos´parents and saw where they lived... i can honestly say that i have never seen anything like i saw today, and the conditions that my kids live in... i´ve never been around the corner of the neighborhood center as i arrive every morning and leave every evening with sylvia by car...
today, however, nicki asked us if we´d like to go meet our neighbors with her, which i suspected was more for us than for her... we walked up a short hill past the graffiti covered walls of the creche, continued up the mountain to where the street no longer is a street and it becomes a gravel road, past the gravel road to where it becomes a dirt path... past the dirt path and into houses carved into the side of the mountains... there were stray, mangy dogs hobbling and barking all over the place, some chained up, some walking freely on the streets... i noticed broken windows, and even lack of windows, just openings where windows should go... there was broken glass from bottles everywhere, trash strewn all over the place, and the smell of urine and feces wafted from gutters flowing nearby the houses... we made our way down the street greeting the people as they peeked out of their windows and doors to see the strangers walk around in their neighborhood... as we´d walk by a house of a family that nicki knew, she´d tell us and then shout into the house to see if anyone was home... many of our little kids were home and getting ready for school as we were walking around during our lunch break... from the kids we got high fives, hugs and shout-outs, from the grown-ups and neighbors, we got a bunch of inquisitive and untrusting looks... as we were introduced to our kids´ parents, they would come out of their homes and shake our hands, give us a kiss on the cheek, and then a warm hug... most of the parents looked like they had been through a lot, haggard and tired, though i guessed their ages to be younger than me... nick, diego, leo and i followed nicki through paths, twists and turns, inbetween buildings and climbed over boulders to go from house to house... one house in particular, we found out, is actually home to three families... two parents each and i believe four kids total... the house could barely be called a house as the roof was patched together scrap materials and the walls looked like discarded bricks stacked on top of each other... there was an old door at the entrance to the home with a lock made out of a bent nail... when we were invited in, i noticed three of our kiddos getting ready for school, washing their faces and combing their hair with the same water from a small bowl... i saw one light in the house, fashioned from spliced electrical wires dangling from a makeshift hook in the center of the room... there was trash strewn about the room and there were pallets of blankets on the floor... as we visited with the family--in portuguese, no less--the mom told us it was time for the kids to walk to school and asked if we wanted to see how they get to school... we all said sure and followed her and the children around the rocks on the mountainside, down the street and made an unassuming turn into an alley... the alley twisted and turned inbetween buildings, down 3-foot drops of stairs, down a slanted walkway, down a rain gutter and finally to a free-standing flight of stone steps that continued down the mountainside... the kids walked past us like we were taking too much time and going to make them late, laughing at us really, while we all just walked in silence or commented about how steep the descent down the mountain was for us... we couldn~t imagine how their little legs and feet could carry them safely up and down the mountain every day, or even imagine how unsafe it must be in the rain...
i think after seeing where our kids come from, we all understood a little more about why they are the way they are... they will literally hug a chair if you let them, they are so liberal with their hugs and kisses... they love a handshake, high-five, a hug and a kiss back... with so little at home i can imagine that their parents have their hands full trying to figure out how to pay the bills or put food on the table, it´s no wonder they are so eager to eat a bowl of rice & beans at the creche every day...
seeing what i saw changed my life and the lives of my fellow bip´s... a while later, after we got back to the creche, we all kind of looked at each other and didn´t say a word... later on that evening, one of the guys, leo, commented that the biggest problem he had before coming to brasil was trying to figure out what color he wanted to order for his new bmw... now, i think he´s re-thinking some things... i know for sure that i´m looking at some things differently and am thinking about my life and how i´ve managed my resources... and how i want to make a difference here at the creche...
many of you, my family and friends, have donated your hard-earned money to help me with expenses while i´m here in brasil this summer... i´ve learned that the creche has a priority list of things they need repaired or need to purchase for the creche and i´m hoping to help with a couple of things on their list because of your contributions... please know that your financial help will be making a difference in the lives of 300+ kids now and for years to come... from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your generosity...
please continue to pray for me that i do what God wants me to do and go where He asks me to go.
muito obrigada,
~crystal
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences. It really is a pleasure to read about and I feel so nostalgic. I wish I could be there helping you guys out.
ReplyDeletecharles, you have helped us so much by sharing your knowledge of the language! i know that without you preparing us we would all be fish out of water! beijos!
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