While in Brazil our team will be making presentations to local Rotary Clubs. Our goal is to share a bit about ourselves and a bit about where we come from.
We'll be making these presentations in Portuguese. Learning a new language is a lot of work. After hours and hours and hours of studying it is still very likely one will not be understood nor understand. We might be taken seriously when trying to be light-hearted--or vice versa. We will feel foolish at times.
This stretching is part of the fun and brings its own rewards. Learning language is also a metaphor for building cross-cultural relationships. Our language errors and accents reveal how we say things in English. How we see the world and respond to it reveals our past experiences.
We will bring our own language to Brazil - literally and figuratively. But we will also do our best to learn and speak our hosts' language - literally and figuratively. We'll make all kinds of mistakes. But we are willing fools.
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