Another Week Gone, Another Round of Goodbyes

What a test of endurance this is.  I am not talking about all of the going, going, going that we do every minute of every day.  If you would have told me that in my 31 years, the hardest thing I would have to do would be to go to Brazil for a month, befriend some of the greatest people in the world and then leave them a week later, I would have called you crazy.  Well, as it goes, here I am with my third family already.  I can not imagine how hard this would be if my new family was not as amazing as the last.  I have only been in Ourinhos for 3 hours, and already I have made friends with the lazy cat, watched my Soccer team (Santos) lose to The Corinthians, and witnessed a Leopard adopting a baby baboon and protect it from a pack of hyenas.  Do not get all worked up, that was on t.v. too.

I have not had real internet for the past week, so I apologize for not updating earlier.  Also, do not forget as you read this, that the Brazilians apparently do not have quotation marks or question marks, so I type out things like (do not) instead of don~t, and I put things in ( ) instead of quotation marks.  I do not normally type this way.

Highlights from this past week:  Everything.

Being in the music capital of South America (I might have made that factoid up, but it sounds about right), we got to see a choral concert of Beatles tunes on Friday as well as a Saturday night symphony.  After the symphony, Mom and Mom let me have my friends over for another party including some delicious wine, some AMAZING tortellini, and the best people in the Tropic of Capricorn.

I got to see the difference between facilities with money and facilities with none.  This included schools and places for homeless elderly and people with disabilities.  One of the facilities I got a chance to visit houses 60 people.  There are about 12 people per room and the facility receives $800 a month from the government.  That works out to be about 43 cents per person, per day.  The rest of the money comes from individuals who care enough and believe that humans should be treated with a certain amount of dignity.  The local Rotary clubs are behind MANY of these facilities and their projects.  When I have toured some of these places and I see all of the Rotary plaques, I try to imagine all of them disappearing at once, and thinking about how sad of a place this would be.  The children on the playground with nowhere else to go but the streets, the elderly making crafts with nobody to help them live.  A very sad place it would be, indeed.

I do not even know where to start with the people of Tatui.  We were greeted by a family of Italian-Brazilians upon arrival in Tatui.  We got to know our new families over pizza and beers.  Enrico, our pizza chef, was my guide for vocational visits and has a special place in my heart.  Toss in Tambelli, Lu, my two moms, and the rest of the crew, and the people of Tatui give the Sorocabians a run for their money (Do not tell the people of Sorocaba).

Week two would not have been complete without a visit with the Mayor of Tatui, a visit to TV TEM, or a dance class at Delmas club, complete with a dance mix designed for the Americans!  And... Let us not forget our trip to the distillery where caçaçia is made.  This may seem like a fun thing to do (Are we really down here doing work), but I promise that taking shots of 151 sugar cane liquor at 10 am before a meeting with the Mayor, is not all it is cracked up to be.