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Sandra's Vacation
Hello all...still having a fantastic time in Brazil. So...the pictures will still have to wait until another time. Possibly even until I'm back. They have stupid computers here in the internet cafe and I don't know if i can upload my photos. Oh well. You'll have to wait until I'm back to see them if you really care that much.
I've done lots of touristy things so far. I've been to the beach...which is full of trash. It's actually a really pretty beach with a beautiful view of the ocean, but there's just a lot of trash on the beach and when the waves come rolling in you can see all this trash in them. Needless to say I haven't been swimming. The sand here is black, there is regular brown sand and underneath is all this black sand, so by the time you leave the beach you're covered in the stuff and you look ridiculous.
We've been out dancing a couple times. Salsa dancing is fun but the samba is really hard to do, the Brazilians joke that they don't learn how to salsa dance, that they just do it when they learn how to walk :)
The bars here are really fun, the locals are really friendly and don't laugh at us too much when we can't do their dances. It's $1 beer night every night! The beer only costs 3 reals (hai-yays), which is an American dollar, fantastic!
Last night we were at an outside bar and it started pouring really hard because it's winter here, the bar flooded but everyone took off their shoes and just kept dancing, it was so fun!
We've also gone on tours of the city and done lots of touristy things and taken lots of pictures. This weekend we're taking a trip to an island and staying there the whole weekend, you can go hiking, kayaking and snorkling, it should be a really good time!
Everyone here is the most insane driver ever; red lights, blinkers and traffic lanes mean nothing to these people. I fear for my life every time I get in a car here, but I haven't seen any car accidents yet, so things are ok.
The house I'm staying in is really nice, there's about 30 people in the house and 6 girls besides me in my room. Everyone in the house is a lot of fun to hang out with, some of them have been here since May! The staff at the house is really nice, they are helping us learn Portuguese and cook delicious food, but I am sick of beans and rice.
And the volunteer work...the reason I really came to Brazil :) I just started at my placement yesterday, I'm in a classroom with about 30 5 year olds and one teacher. She doesn't have a lot of resources and just seems so grateful that I'm there to help her out. So far I've just been teaching the children English, they seem very interested in learning it.
The children at my placement are fantastic, they just seem like they really need a lot of love. A lot of them have allready learned my name and were really excited to see me today. They tease me because I can't speak Portuguese, but are also very willing to help me learn the language. When I'm observing their lessons I feel like I'm getting just as much out of them as they are!
The conditions the children and their families live in are really bad...I don't think I expected them to be this bad. The homes are falling down, there is garbage and stray dogs everywhere and children always wandering the streets by themselves. There are children that look to me as young as 7 who are addicted to crack and walk the streets asking people for money, there are also children whose parents send them out into busy streets to perform dances and stunts for money. Today at my placement the teacher was teaching the children not to touch rats and to throw away the garbage in their homes because the rats carry a disease that is killing children 24 hours after they are contaminated with it.
The children play games where they pretend to shoot each other and act out scenes regularly seen on the streets of Brazil such as muggings. It's so sad that these events are part of the every day reality of these children's lives.
It is so heartbreaking to me that the children are brought up in these conditions and probably don't have much of a chance of getting out of them. I wish I could do more to help them but I'm glad I'm here to give them love and attention, which they are so obviously starving for.
Well, this is a super long entry, and I'm having a really hard time typing on this keyboard, the keys are set up really weird.
Hopefully this was interesting to read and next time I'll have pictures!
Love you and miss you all!
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