So...this will be my last entry since I'm leaving on Saturday. It feels like I've allready been here for a month. Graca, Salvador is starting to feel like home. I don't want to leave, 2 weeks wasn't long enough, but at the same time I'll be really glad to get back to the states. It will be so nice to be able to eat familiar food and be able to go places without paying some insane cab driver to get me there. Also, I have a really huge amount of respect for people who permanently move to a foreign country and make it there new home. It is so exhausting and frustrating that every time I go out I have to try and communicate with people in my very limited Portuguese, every time I leave the house I have to either hope that I have enough vocabulary to communicate with people or that I'm lucky enough to find someone who has some knowledge of the English language. There have been times when I've been going home in a cab and the cab driver can't even understand me when I tell him what street I live on, it's so incredibly frustrating. Also, being white and obviously American, I'm constantly on display when I go out. I don't live in a touristy area so when I go out people are always staring at me and I hear them say things like "There goes a Gringa", which basically translates to "stupid American". It will be nice to be back home where I don't completely stand out. Every time I feel frustrated by a situation like this I think to myself, "I'll be back home soon where things like this don't happen to me." So I can't even imagine how people who move to a new country feel, there is no comfort of going back "home" to them, home is the new foreign place they live in. My work at my placement has been absolutely wonderful. The kids get really excited to see me when I arrive in the morning and all of them pretty much learned my name after my second day there (I guess my name is a common Brazilian name, every time I meet someone new they'll say "Oh I know this person who has the same name") I feel like I've made a real connection with some of the kids and I really enjoy the work I've been doing with them. It is very rewarding to be able to give them extra support and also to provide materials for them to do new activities they wouldn't normally have had the resources for. Today I got to visit three homes of children who attend the school I'm working in. It was a really humbling experience. The children at my school live in a favella called Peri Peri. Favella roughly translates to "shanty town" in English. We met the families of the children and talked with them about their occupations, their neighborhood they lived in and their every day lives. One of the children lived in a fairly nice home that her father had built, they owned their own land and were very proud to actually have their own home. The other two families lived in very small homes constructed only of concrete, they had running water and electricity but not much else. All three of the families basically said that they earn no more than $150 American dollars a month, but they honestly make so much out of what they have. All of the families simply want the best for their children and all expressed a desire to move out of the area they lived in. I felt so bad for one of the mothers because she started crying when she was telling us how unsafe the neighborhood was and she was usually afraid to even let her children play outside by themselves. Unfortunatly because of the way their society is set up these children may have a very little chance of actually moving out of these types of neighborhoods. Ok...enough of all this depressing talk. I love the kids I'm working with. They're fantastic and smart and funny and I'll be sad to leave them. Their teacher, Marivalda, told me today how proud she is of me and she wishes I could stay to be her assistant all of the time. I was really pleased that she felt I was making such a positive impact even though I have such limited means of communicating with the children. And the fun stuff I've been doing. I went to Morro de Sao Paulo last weekend, which was so fun. It's a little island right off of Salvador, it took us about 3 hours to get there. The whole place is sand, there are no cars on the island so they don't even have paved roads. While we were there we just hung out on the beach and went to bars, went swimming in the ocean. On Sunday we went on a hike through the jungle and went to a mud bath, I can't wait until I have pictures of it, they are hilarious. The island was a nice break from the work week, it made me feel like I was actually on vacation :) I need to get going now, I'm going to a Bahia soccer (futball!) game tonight. Should be pretty interesting. I'll be home Sunday! Miss you and love you all! (Check this thing again for pictures after I get home!)