Here I am

May 7th

Well, here I am in Fortaleza Brazil. Driving through the city on our way to our house reminded me a lot of Santa Cruz. It's hot and humid here, just like Santa Cruz. It's extremely green, especially coming in, just like Santa Cruz. And there are a lot of homeless people begging in the streets, just like Santa Cruz. I'll be honest, that last one surprised me a bit. I wasn't really expecting Brazil to be like the United States, but a part of me at least wanted to believe that I would not see the same amount of poverty here in Fortaleza that I saw in Santa Cruz. I probably won't see the extremely poor neighborhoods like the ones I worked in on my mission, but that's only because I probably won't be getting very far out of the city center.

Our manager, Fernando, seems like a really nice guy and does everything he can to look out for us. He will probably even be lending us his satellite internet card so that we can get internet in our place (or any other place we may decide to go for that matter). He said he's paying for the service for when he goes out of town, but since he doesn't need it unless he goes on a trip, he's just going to let us use it. That'll be nice.

I was pretty exhausted from the flight. In fact, I should probably be sleeping right now instead of writing this, but I'm past the point of feeling sleepy. We made it safe and sound and thirty minutes late to Fortaleza, but our stuff didn't. It's still in Miami. At least I hope it is. Assuming all goes according to plans, we'll get our bags back tomorrow morning. So I don't have any clean clothes to wear for the day :(

It's barely dawning on me that this is going to be hard. I speak well enough to get around, but it is frustrating having to have someone repeat what they say three times so that I can understand. But this is going to be so much fun. I mean, hey, I live like three blocks away from the beach.

May 8^th

I feel a lot better today considering I actually got some sleep last night. Actually, I might have got too much sleep.

We got our stuff back! Apparently it took a lot of effort on the part of our manager to get our stuff back, including him being detained briefly because he was trying to get stuff that didn't belong to him, but I now have clean clothes, which is a huge comfort.

I'm getting really excited to teach next week. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow we have just been (will be) observing. But I'm noticing all the cool things that we're going to be able to do with the workshop.

We went into one of the neighborhoods today. I actually felt more at home there than I did in the area that we live in because the area was so much more like Bolivia: that is, the houses were really close together, there were people playing out in the street, and there were little corner stores all over the place. It was really weird though how that made me feel more at home than anything else. K, well that's it for today. Hopefully I get to post this before I have too much to write tomorrow.

P.S. Sorry this is so long...