Smorgasboard

I can’t believe it’s only been two and a half weeks since Jess and I arrived here. So much happens every day, it feels like we spend each day racing to get as much done as possible before we collapse on our beds at night. We’re pretty exhausted, but it’s a good, satisfying exhaustion from having accomplished a lot. Here’s a ‘potluck’ of the things that are currently part of our lives:

School
I think I mentioned before that I was happily surprised by the school setup and environment. After a week of preparation for the beginning of the school year on Monday, I can say I’m even happier to be a part of it. We didn’t just sign up to be teachers when we took these jobs. The school’s philosophy (boiled down to essentials) is not to focus simply on high-quality education, but to produce well-rounded, proper people who will be an asset to the world. They really are about developing the whole person. Which means we play a lot of the Mom role as teachers. It’s the little details that show it. For example, every student is given a toothbrush and after lunch we take our classes to the washroom and help them all brush their teeth. Crazy, eh?
We’re working with a great group of teachers, which is good because we’re at school a long time. Our schedule’s been changed a bit. We now go from 7am until 4pm, with an hour off for lunch. Starting at 7 means that we have to catch our bus at 6:10, which means that we’ve got to start waking up around 5:15, which means we’ve got to be in bed around 9 at night. Which means that we have almost no life outside of school at present. We’re looking for a place closer to the school as a result. More on that later.
I found out this week that here time isn’t money the way it is back home. In this sense: all the things that teachers buy to put up in their classrooms back home, I was making by hand. Jess made an entire alphabet (printing and cursive, upper and lowercase) for her classroom, cut each square down to size, pasted it onto coloured Bristol board, and has yet to laminate them. By hand. I spent much of my week making large posters of the class schedule, a birthday calendar, a special helper board etc. Oh, and we both worked together on a bulletin board for the school. We used recycled materials for the whole thing, including kids’artwork from previous years. The school is really big on recycling. I have to say that even though doing all these things takes tons of time, there’s a great deal of satisfaction when you get to the finished product knowing that you made it yourself as opposed to having bought it.
School starts tomorrow. It’ll be exciting to meet all the students!

Buses
Bus rides are an adventure. Actually, they’re quite hilarious once you get a seat. The driver’s seem to all have two modes. The first mode is to gun it, and the second is slam on the brakes. For corners, as Jess describes it, it’s seems that their goal is to make it around using only two wheels. So what happens is you get on the bus, and you pass the driver, and then you have to give your money to the cobrador, who gives you change if you need it, and then he swipes his card so that you can go through one of those metal turn thingys to get to the seats, if there are any. If you ride the bus early, you most likely won’t get a seat, but it’s pretty easy to stay standing because there are so many people that you can’t actually fall anywhere. However, getting off can be a challenge. One day Jess and I had to squeeze through people and I had to keep yanking my backpack through after me until we made it to the back door. If you ride the bus at 8 or 9 you are more likely to get a seat, but it can be tricky to stay standing until you do. I noticed yesterday that I somehow pulled a muscle in my right leg, and I’m pretty sure it happened while trying to stay upright on a moving bus.

Banks
The last thing we need to do to be setup here is to open a bank account. We tried this week, but we’re still missing a piece of documentation. Banks are open from 10 until 4, Monday to Friday. Which means that when we want to deposit our paycheck, we’re going to have to ask for time off work. It kind of makes me wonder why we’re getting bank accounts at all. Except when I think about stockpiling cash at home (that’s how we’ll be getting paid) I remember why.

Our Neighbourhood
We love it here! It’s feels like what I imaged Brazil to be. We live in the oldest neighbourhood of the city, and I know I’ve described it before, but I want to paint the full picture now that we’ve been around. It’s like the neighbourhood is a small city in itself. People refer to this area as little Minas Gerais (the state just north of us) because there are so many mineiros who live here. We’re on the main street, which makes for constant noise. Here are the things you’ll see and hear at any given moment: groups of people standing in the street, or just outside a place to eat, chatting and wasting the day away, big kids and little kids out in full force flying their kites as high as possible and trying to avoid getting them caught in the rows of telephone wires, dogs meandering up and down the street in search of food, cars, fuscas, buses, horse-drawn carts, men unloading trucks and carrying heavy loads from one place to another, people working on their cars, a game of street football, bare-footed people in the supermarket aisles, soap-opera scenes taking place in the street in the wee hours of the morning, birds singing, dogs barking (and barking and barking), mothers carrying babies, kids darting around in their bare feet sent out on errands by their mothers, busy people, doing-nothing people, people people and more people. It’s been fun to find the little useful shops along our road, the sewing shop, the health-food shop, the internet cafés, the bakeries, the ice cream shops, the pharmacies (where we can weigh ourselves for free to see just how much we have or haven’t been eating). And it’s fun to start establishing relationships with the people who work in all these places. The neighbourhood certainly lends itself to a certain sense of belonging in a very short while. We’re already sad that we can’t stay.
I’ve learned to sleep with the noise. My ears were sore from using earplugs every night, so I realized I just had to get used to it. A good dose of tiredness every night helps a lot! But when it starts raining at night, Jess usually says, “Quick! Let’s try and fall asleep before the rain stops and people get back out into the street!”

Our ``Family``
We love them too! The lady we live with is named Bernadette, and her two sons are Eduardo and Vinicius. Her sister, Benita, also lives with us. Her fiancé Paulo is often over with his daughter, Paula. They’re all really happy people, and it turns out that Bernadette is a Christian, which we discovered shortly after we arrived. She was thrilled to know that we are too. Considering that it was decided that we would live here only a day before we arrived, I am certain that the Lord’s hand was in the choosing of us being here. We feel completely at home. It’s going to be hard to go.

Apartment-Hunting
Our friend Daniel, who we met at the International conference in September through our friend Marcio, was super kind to take us to look at places yesterday. Here you go through real-estate agents even to rent apartments. We’re asking for something ‘’impossible’’ between our combination of wanting 1)walking distance from the school, 2) something furnished, 3) a low price 4) a pleasant place to live. We’d looked at places the first week we were here. It’s so interesting to me how you get feelings just by walking into places. I mean, I’ve always took home for granted before. Home was wherever my Mom and Dad chose to live, and it was always great. But you learn pretty quickly what to look for, and almost as soon as the front door is opened I can get a pretty good sense as to whether or not I could handle living in the place. One place was particularly horrific (everything was narrow and dark and made me feel like I was in hiding during war times), which has made me appreciate pretty much every other place we’ve looked at. So, anyway, yesterday we looked at two places, and the second place, aside from being a one-bedroom apartment, seems to combine all of our unrealistic requirements. It’s in a great neighbourhood, fully furnished (except we’d have to buy another bed), within walking distance from the school, fairly bright and homey, and at an extremely reasonable price. Neither of us being good on-the-spot decision-makers, we haven’t decided for sure, but I’m getting the feeling that this is the place the Lord prepared for us. Pray for us.

The Feira
I am at a complete loss as to how to convey my extreme pleasure of getting to live in a country where there are street markets. Certain streets have markets on different days of the week, where vendors set up around 6 in the morning and sell their fruits, vegetables, meat, grains etc. until around 1pm. Jess and I went today for the first time, to one a few blocks away. It made us so incredibly happy to wander from stall to stall and find things like Quinoa, fresh spinach, granola, sweets, cheeses . . . in amongst the noisy crowd of vendors and market goers. You can get them to grate a fresh coconut in front of you. How cool is that?

Jesus
Although this is the last topic of today’s post, it really is the most important, because it’s what makes all the rest have any meaning. Over and over again the Lord has been showing that He is with us, and what it means to live life walking with Him. I have to say that Psalm 16 best describes how we feel about life right now: In Your presence is fullness of joy. I can see that the Lord is teaching us what it means to live in His presence. It’s not something apart from real life. But it makes life real. It makes all the seemingly insignificant details of life have meaning. Something so subtle happened in our apartment-searching yesterday, and I realized that Jesus was with us and teaching us how to follow him in such a gentle way, that it made me so incredibly excited. Both Jess and I are really, really happy. No, not happy. We’ve got real joy. Not because things are easy, or because they’re comfortable. Actually, if I look at the facts there are many things missing in my life. With our time so limited, I’ve had such little opportunity to contact people outside of my immediate world. But somehow everything is okay. It’s so exciting when one of us reads a verse, or a book, or a song, and realizes the Lord is supplying us. It’s so incredible to see how the Lord leads us through our prayer together each day. It’s so wonderful to be with Jesus.
My heart feels so full that it could burst.

This, however, is not a license to all of you to not write. Because I really want to hear from you. We need contact with life outside of Sao Jose dos Campos, and I apologize to all the people I haven’t written yet. My plan was to write more emails today, but I’m overwhelmed with everyone I want to write, and so I decided to do this instead to fill everybody in at once. But if I haven’t written you yet, please know that I’ve been thinking of you still, and that I would have written had time allowed it. You can pretend you got a letter and write one back :).

This will be the end of today’s massive entry, because we’ve really got to get out to the internet. I’m typing this up on my laptop so that I can just copy and paste it once we arrive, because we’ve still got to do our wash (which is semi-by-hand) and do some baking and food prep for our breakfasts and dinners this week. I’m so glad that we get a good solid lunch at school every day. Not having to make lunch the night before is one of the most beautiful feelings as I crawl into bed!