1. It was brought to my attention that my third post in my recent blog blitz was out of order and dated as November 7. I figured out it was because I had written it early and published it later, so it was published on the original date. Make sure to check it out, it's about my friend's visit to Natal!
2. My friend Brent, who is a Peace Corps volunteer in Armenia, has done it again. He wrote a very poignant post on the role loneliness plays when you are living overseas, away from your home culture. He also beautifully explains how that place that, at first seemed so lonely, suddenly turns into home. If you would like to read it, click here.
The blogging blitz continues...
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Classes
As I mentioned before, coming out of LST season, as I like to call it, is like the crash after drinking one of those Monster energy drinks. I walk around dazed, not sure what to do during the hours of 9 to 9. I look at the food in my kitchen and wonder how I am supposed to cook it. The phone rings and I cringe, hoping it's not a reader canceling his reading session. And then I remember that the LST season has passed. I have my own classes to put together and begin. I take the food out of the refrigerator and remember that I have never cooked anything complicated, and just because I have been eating in a lot of restaurants doesn't mean I forgot all of my kitchen knowledge. And when the phone rings, I remember that it's most likely not for me. (And then I do a little dance.)
As fun as it is getting an average of 2 hours of sleep more each night in those weeks following the end of the LST season, the most fun part is most definitely getting to continue in the studies with the LST readers. Unfortunately, going from a team of workers with 5 members to my team which includes exactly 1 worker (me), not all of the readers can continue. I ask the opinion of the LST teams on who they think has the interest to continue, and who seemed the most open to talking and learning about the Bible.
This year I put a list together of about 25 readers. Most of them were put into group classes, and because of scheduling conflicts, two were put into individual reading sessions. The group classes have been using The Sycamore Series, a series of Bible studies published by Let's Start Talking. Since the intended audience of the series is native English speakers, the studies go deeper and use longer texts than the regular LST material aimed at those who are learning English. Since most of my students are very advanced English speakers, it has been an absolutely perfect fit. They have loved the texts, the new vocabulary, and the questions that really make them think. We have had great conversations about trust, baptism, Jesus' crucifixion, and what it means to live in a way that reflects we know those stories.
Not only do I love watching my students discover these stories and make real-life applications, it has also been encouraging to me to read these stories I've known for so long through fresh eyes. I am thankful for the way the Holy Spirit has moved in these studies and taught us all more about God's word. As always, I pray that they will gradually begin to care less and less about the English and more and more about God's message.
As fun as it is getting an average of 2 hours of sleep more each night in those weeks following the end of the LST season, the most fun part is most definitely getting to continue in the studies with the LST readers. Unfortunately, going from a team of workers with 5 members to my team which includes exactly 1 worker (me), not all of the readers can continue. I ask the opinion of the LST teams on who they think has the interest to continue, and who seemed the most open to talking and learning about the Bible.
This year I put a list together of about 25 readers. Most of them were put into group classes, and because of scheduling conflicts, two were put into individual reading sessions. The group classes have been using The Sycamore Series, a series of Bible studies published by Let's Start Talking. Since the intended audience of the series is native English speakers, the studies go deeper and use longer texts than the regular LST material aimed at those who are learning English. Since most of my students are very advanced English speakers, it has been an absolutely perfect fit. They have loved the texts, the new vocabulary, and the questions that really make them think. We have had great conversations about trust, baptism, Jesus' crucifixion, and what it means to live in a way that reflects we know those stories.
Not only do I love watching my students discover these stories and make real-life applications, it has also been encouraging to me to read these stories I've known for so long through fresh eyes. I am thankful for the way the Holy Spirit has moved in these studies and taught us all more about God's word. As always, I pray that they will gradually begin to care less and less about the English and more and more about God's message.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Friends are friends forever, especially when you live on the beach
Since moving to Natal, I have invited so many friends to come visit me that I never even started counting. I invite everyone, hoping that one day someone might say "Hey...that sounds like a good idea!" and actually come. Never did I actually imagine that it would happen. Natal is hard to get to-- so hard that I assumed only the love of a family member would be enough to make someone actually make the trip. I have been blessed to host my parents here twice in the last three years and my sister and brother-in-law once. I was a pretty happy camper.
Enter: July. My friend Lezlie, whom I went to high school with, puts up a Facebook status saying she has some money, has some time before the semester starts, and would like to take an international trip. Did anyone have any suggestions? I, of course, jumped at the chance and was first to comment with "come to Natal!" Imagine my shock when she wrote back and basically said "Really? Ok." I never thought that would happen!
Mere weeks later I was picking up Lezlie and her friend, Jason, from the Natal airport for a week of Brazilian fun. The timing was perfect. I had just finished up the LST season and was in desperate need of some down time. What better way to spend down time than showing off my beautiful city to my friend?
The week she was here went quickly, but we had a blast! We stayed at a hotel on the beach for a couple nights, which means we had great Brazilian hotel breakfast for a couple mornings. We enjoyed the hotel's rooftop pool and its entrance right onto the beach. We got massages on the beach and spent a day on a dune buggy. Lezlie got to try all of the most important Brazilian foods and meet my church family. I'm so thankful she came!
Lezlie, Jason, and I on the dune buggy
Lezlie and I overlooking my future residence (yeah right)
Enter: July. My friend Lezlie, whom I went to high school with, puts up a Facebook status saying she has some money, has some time before the semester starts, and would like to take an international trip. Did anyone have any suggestions? I, of course, jumped at the chance and was first to comment with "come to Natal!" Imagine my shock when she wrote back and basically said "Really? Ok." I never thought that would happen!
Mere weeks later I was picking up Lezlie and her friend, Jason, from the Natal airport for a week of Brazilian fun. The timing was perfect. I had just finished up the LST season and was in desperate need of some down time. What better way to spend down time than showing off my beautiful city to my friend?
The week she was here went quickly, but we had a blast! We stayed at a hotel on the beach for a couple nights, which means we had great Brazilian hotel breakfast for a couple mornings. We enjoyed the hotel's rooftop pool and its entrance right onto the beach. We got massages on the beach and spent a day on a dune buggy. Lezlie got to try all of the most important Brazilian foods and meet my church family. I'm so thankful she came!
Lezlie, Jason, and I on the dune buggy
Lezlie and I overlooking my future residence (yeah right)The invitation is still open for anyone else who would like to come visit! I promise that Natal and I will partner together to show you a great time!
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Brazilian Elections
If I were to say "I'm so glad elections are over!" you would probably say "me too!" If I were to say "I'm so glad the bumper stickers are gone...and the TV ads...and the robocalls..." you would probably say "me too!" If I were to say "I'm so glad the streets are quiet..." you would probably say "huh?"
Some of you may remember two years ago my post about the local city elections. I was pretty excited because I got to (had to) vote and it was my first time voting in Brazil. This time around, it was still exciting because we were voting for president, but it lost its luster as soon as the dreaded political jingles started waking me up at inconvenient times and disrupting my quiet life.
The biggest way that political candidates advertise their candidacy is by BLASTING their campaign jingles. Here we vote by a candidate's election ID number, so the jingle has to be annoying enough to get stuck in your head and permanently burn the candidate's number into your brain so that you will remember it on election day. They start about two months ahead of the elections and drive around the city all day long, every day of the week. The richer the candidate, the more money he has to rent giant sound cars and, sometimes, trucks the size of a parade float. This year the elections were for governor, state reps, federal reps, federal senators, and the president. The good news is that, since those positions are a bit more prestigious than city councilman, there were fewer candidates and thus fewer jingles. The bad news is there were still jingles. And lots of 'em.
Election day was blissful. On election day the sound cars are silenced and the Brazilian people are allowed to go to the polling stations in peace. Due to Brazil's high-tech voting system, soon after polls closed at 5pm we knew who had won. Our state's new governor was announced, as were our reps and senators. Only the presidential election was sent into a runoff because none of the candidates got 50% of the vote. But the presidential runoff was still 3 weeks away, and so I began to dream of my life going back to normal. I live on one of the main thoroughfares through town, so my street had been heavily trafficked by ALL of the campaign cars.
The day after the election I was leaving for a trip to Sao Paulo at 3:30 am. I went to bed at midnight, planning on getting 3 hours of sleep before leaving for the airport. At approximately 1:58 am, I was jolted awake by the sound of a campaign jingle. "This isn't right," I thought. "The election is over. And it's 2am!" I looked out my window and saw a small group of people gathered on the corner, waving the new governor's flag and dancing to her jingle. I was pretty frustrated, knowing I would lose one full hour of sleep before going to the airport. I went back to bed, hoping that I would be sleepy enough to drown it out. Wrong. Minutes later, this happened:
That's right. That's the new governor's victory parade, which paraded by my apartment for at least half an hour. The crackling sounds are fireworks. The song is one of her campaign jingles, one of the many that I heard for two straight months. The people dancing in the street are probably drunk. All of this footage was taken from my bedroom window, where I was obviously not sleeping but thankfully lucid enough to grab my camera and document it as probably no one would believe me if I were to just tell the story. At some point the new governor rode by on one of the trucks, but I can't remember if it's on the video.
Oh yeah, and the female candidate won the presidential runoff last Sunday. I thought it was pretty cool that I got to witness and participate in Brazilians electing their first woman president!
Maybe NOW things will quiet down....
Some of you may remember two years ago my post about the local city elections. I was pretty excited because I got to (had to) vote and it was my first time voting in Brazil. This time around, it was still exciting because we were voting for president, but it lost its luster as soon as the dreaded political jingles started waking me up at inconvenient times and disrupting my quiet life.
The biggest way that political candidates advertise their candidacy is by BLASTING their campaign jingles. Here we vote by a candidate's election ID number, so the jingle has to be annoying enough to get stuck in your head and permanently burn the candidate's number into your brain so that you will remember it on election day. They start about two months ahead of the elections and drive around the city all day long, every day of the week. The richer the candidate, the more money he has to rent giant sound cars and, sometimes, trucks the size of a parade float. This year the elections were for governor, state reps, federal reps, federal senators, and the president. The good news is that, since those positions are a bit more prestigious than city councilman, there were fewer candidates and thus fewer jingles. The bad news is there were still jingles. And lots of 'em.
Election day was blissful. On election day the sound cars are silenced and the Brazilian people are allowed to go to the polling stations in peace. Due to Brazil's high-tech voting system, soon after polls closed at 5pm we knew who had won. Our state's new governor was announced, as were our reps and senators. Only the presidential election was sent into a runoff because none of the candidates got 50% of the vote. But the presidential runoff was still 3 weeks away, and so I began to dream of my life going back to normal. I live on one of the main thoroughfares through town, so my street had been heavily trafficked by ALL of the campaign cars.
The day after the election I was leaving for a trip to Sao Paulo at 3:30 am. I went to bed at midnight, planning on getting 3 hours of sleep before leaving for the airport. At approximately 1:58 am, I was jolted awake by the sound of a campaign jingle. "This isn't right," I thought. "The election is over. And it's 2am!" I looked out my window and saw a small group of people gathered on the corner, waving the new governor's flag and dancing to her jingle. I was pretty frustrated, knowing I would lose one full hour of sleep before going to the airport. I went back to bed, hoping that I would be sleepy enough to drown it out. Wrong. Minutes later, this happened:
That's right. That's the new governor's victory parade, which paraded by my apartment for at least half an hour. The crackling sounds are fireworks. The song is one of her campaign jingles, one of the many that I heard for two straight months. The people dancing in the street are probably drunk. All of this footage was taken from my bedroom window, where I was obviously not sleeping but thankfully lucid enough to grab my camera and document it as probably no one would believe me if I were to just tell the story. At some point the new governor rode by on one of the trucks, but I can't remember if it's on the video.
Oh yeah, and the female candidate won the presidential runoff last Sunday. I thought it was pretty cool that I got to witness and participate in Brazilians electing their first woman president!
Maybe NOW things will quiet down....
Well this is embarrassing...
I came here today to see how long it had been since my last post. I was very ashamed to find a thin, blue "September 21" staring right back at me, and even more embarrassed that that post wasn't even legit, since I was sharing someone else's blog with you. I had some pretty great intentions to resume my regular blogging, especially after my 3-year anniversary, but apparently good intentions don't get me very far. Does anyone even read this blog anymore?
Coming out of LST season is like crashing after a sugar high. For two packed months I was going going going and then suddenly...I was going, resting, going some more, and then resting a little longer, and then thinking about going, and then definitely resting. The pace of my everyday life has definitely changed, but it has not been unexciting!
In order to not write one huge post that people might not even read, I am going to prepare several posts to publish throughout the next days/weeks for you to get caught up on what's happened since July. As a reminder to myself, and so that you can hold me accountable, there will be posts about the following things:
Coming out of LST season is like crashing after a sugar high. For two packed months I was going going going and then suddenly...I was going, resting, going some more, and then resting a little longer, and then thinking about going, and then definitely resting. The pace of my everyday life has definitely changed, but it has not been unexciting!
In order to not write one huge post that people might not even read, I am going to prepare several posts to publish throughout the next days/weeks for you to get caught up on what's happened since July. As a reminder to myself, and so that you can hold me accountable, there will be posts about the following things:
- my first non-family visitor
- Brazilian elections
- Children's Day
- my trip to Sao Paulo for the Continent Care Connection
- my group classes
- the continuation of the church's remodeling process (tentative)
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
This is where the missing starts
I can think of two times in the past three years that I have used this blog to link to something else that I thought was worth your time. Once was to show a YouTube video of a cute baby who bites his older brother's finger then laughs about it, and the second was to share a link to my friend Brent's blog on how much he misses Mexican food while living in Armenia volunteering with the Peace Corps. So, it's safe to say pretty much never do I share external links. I guess I figure that those of you who read this blog are reading to hear how things are going here in Natal, and not to know what videos I think are funny (although that one of the baby is pretty funny...you should watch it) or what political commentaries I'm following as of late. That's what Facebook and Twitter are for. :)
So, in my reasoning, if a person almost never does something, then one day does that thing, there must be a reason. My aforementioned friend, Brent, has been in Armenia for 16 months. I've followed his blog since he arrived as we have had a lot of the same cross-cultural adjustment experiences. Recently, his mom got to be his first visitor. After 16 months of seeing his mom through a computer screen, he was able to spend a week with her, showing her off to Armenia and showing Armenia off to her.
Please take 5 minutes to read the post he wrote about that time. He beautifully, eloquently captures the love, joy, and excitement that I believe all of us who live away from our loved ones feel that first time we are reunited with them away from "home." You won't regret it. And you might cry a little.
Read Brent's post by clicking here.
So, in my reasoning, if a person almost never does something, then one day does that thing, there must be a reason. My aforementioned friend, Brent, has been in Armenia for 16 months. I've followed his blog since he arrived as we have had a lot of the same cross-cultural adjustment experiences. Recently, his mom got to be his first visitor. After 16 months of seeing his mom through a computer screen, he was able to spend a week with her, showing her off to Armenia and showing Armenia off to her.
Please take 5 minutes to read the post he wrote about that time. He beautifully, eloquently captures the love, joy, and excitement that I believe all of us who live away from our loved ones feel that first time we are reunited with them away from "home." You won't regret it. And you might cry a little.
Read Brent's post by clicking here.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
3 years
Today marks 3 years since the day I arrived in Natal. Coincidentally, I was just tackling an email inbox clean-up and went to the very beginning. I found a lot of emails from that time. It's pretty cool to read how excited I was...how clueless I was...how anxious I was...how bad my Portuguese was.
It's amazing that it's been 3 years. I'm reading these emails as though it were a completely different person who wrote them. And in a way, it was. Usually on these anniversaries I blog something sentimental, showing you pictures of the past 12 months or whatever. But today I don't feel like doing that. I think maybe the past two anniversaries I felt like it was momentous, I felt like looking back. Not today. Today feels like a normal day, just like any other. I don't feel sentimental, nor do I feel like I accomplished something huge.
Maybe it's because now Natal is home. My life here is my life. It's not a vacation, it's not a trip, it's not an adventure anymore. It's not something I feel like blogging about all the time like that first year, because now I think it's normal to buy eggs one at a time.
So how have I celebrated this non-momentous momentous occasion? Last night 5 of my friends from church came over. We watched a movie, ate some pasta, played some Uno, and laughed with our friend as she tried to catch a slipping 2-liter Sprite and inadvertently sprayed it ALL OVER my dining room wall. It has been so, so long since I laughed that hard. I told them about this special day and we all kind of just sat there staring at each other. "Wow," one said, "has it really been three years?" And then we went back to laughing about the wall.
Like I said, this is home. This feels normal. And that's exactly how I think it should be.
It's amazing that it's been 3 years. I'm reading these emails as though it were a completely different person who wrote them. And in a way, it was. Usually on these anniversaries I blog something sentimental, showing you pictures of the past 12 months or whatever. But today I don't feel like doing that. I think maybe the past two anniversaries I felt like it was momentous, I felt like looking back. Not today. Today feels like a normal day, just like any other. I don't feel sentimental, nor do I feel like I accomplished something huge.
Maybe it's because now Natal is home. My life here is my life. It's not a vacation, it's not a trip, it's not an adventure anymore. It's not something I feel like blogging about all the time like that first year, because now I think it's normal to buy eggs one at a time.
So how have I celebrated this non-momentous momentous occasion? Last night 5 of my friends from church came over. We watched a movie, ate some pasta, played some Uno, and laughed with our friend as she tried to catch a slipping 2-liter Sprite and inadvertently sprayed it ALL OVER my dining room wall. It has been so, so long since I laughed that hard. I told them about this special day and we all kind of just sat there staring at each other. "Wow," one said, "has it really been three years?" And then we went back to laughing about the wall.
Like I said, this is home. This feels normal. And that's exactly how I think it should be.
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