I received numerous emails in the past few weeks dealing with the monthly updates of the exchange students who are arriving in their host countries in the end of August and beginning of September, and realized that I haven´t been sending them out in my first 5 months here. While I´ve been writing on my blog sporadically, there hasn´t been much sent directly to Central States Rotary.
Right now, I will write up a detailed review of my time in Brazil because I find it important that everybody sees what I´m up to and how I´m coping with the complete change of lifestyle, culture, and reality.
In these past few months, I have had the most incredible, life altering experiences that I could ever have imagined. Hopefully they are the first of many to come. First and foremost, I spent a week and a half in the Amazon rainforest and it was absolutely phenomenal. I stayed two nights in a hotel in Manaus (a big city in the middle of the Amazon) and the rest of the time was spent floating on a boat up the Rio Amazonas and Rio Preto, two rivers that merge and form a sort of border because of the solute within them that doesn´t mix. You can see where one river ends and the other begins..it is really, really neat. We travelled with two large boats and a handful of canoes. On one large boat, there was an area for sleeping, hanging out and travelling, while the other was solely for meal time. The boats would float up next to one another, attach and wait for all 50 exchangers to pass over, and while we ate, the boats would detach, continue on the journey, and the staff would put away our hammocks and tidy up a bit. The staff, I should say, was marvelous. They spent sleepless nights staying up with a handful of really, really ill students, taught us everything and anything we wanted to know about the forest, kept things under control while encouraging fun, and made friendships with the exchangers that will never be forgotten. One man in particular, Josefet, told stories of the village that he grew up in and sparked an interest within me and another girl from Australia, Jess, to help volunteer or work with the people and the nature in the forest. We have maintained contact with him through brief internet use to this day. Speaking of the Australians, they completely outnumbered the other foreigners on this trip. While there were people from every country on the boat (from anywhere! South Africa, India, Germany, Poland, Canada, USA, Denmark, Taiwan, Sweden, Japan, China, Thailand, France, Belgium, Mexico, etc.), everybody communicated in English or Portuguese, and the boat literally became one enormous family by the end of the trip.
In the days that we spent on the river, the boat would continuously stop and everybody would change into bathing suits and jump of the edge into the Amazon River for a swim. We swam with pink dolphins in front of the sunset, caught alligators and piranhas in canoes, had a campfire on a deserted graveyard beach, sang music and played instruments every night under the stars (which were UNBELIEVEABLE because of the lack of light pollution), slept in the forest for one night, bathed in insect repellent, wrote music about getting sick from the different bacteria (3 bathrooms for 50 exchange students, over half of them very sick D: ick), hiked through the forest and learned about the uses of the different trees and plants, let ants crawl all over our hands, and afterwards rubbed them in to get rid of our human scent, went swimming under waterfalls and exploring in caves throughout the middle of the night, hung out with monkeys and sloths, ate fruit directly from the tree that we picked up on a canoe, made excellent friendships with the Indigenous tribes that were open to share their culture, sang a "This Christmas" to a tribe after they welcomed us with a song of theirs (in the month of May), ate the most delicious fruit that I´ve ever eaten every single day, made bracelets and other things with the açai seeds of the forest, learned how to make their food...I went seed/flower collecting with a darling Canadian girl, hung out with everybody all day, every day, and for one night slept underneath the stars outside of the canopy because it was more comfortable and awoke the next morning to dolphins swimming in front of the sunrise, which was composed of a mixture of every one of the richest colors I’ve ever seen in my life.
In short, it was the most life altering, fulfilling, wonderful and maturing experience that I´ve ever had. Well, equal to some others that I´ve had here. In the past few months, along with learning the culture and making wonderful friendships, I´ve gone to a favela with my friend´s mom to help out. I´ve begun teaching English classes to a group of beautiful little children who haven´t better means to learn and are failing their public school classes. I translated for the program Shelter Box (which is jointed with Rotary) that sent two marvelous individuals from England, where Shelter Box originated, to help set them up. I translated the stories of the people who lost their homes in the flooding, for whom the Boxes were sent, and made excellent friendships with them. I set up more than 40 tents every day and met the most incredible individuals of my entire life. I´ve been lucky enough to meet two wonderful groups of exchange students because of my different exchange timing. Also, I helped out struggling friends by buying food and bringing it to their houses. During the first half of my exchange, I have learned huge amounts about the human spirit, about myself, about greed and power but primarily, about how humanity really unites when it needs to, and more than anything, I have learned of the force of love, learning, creativity and the importance of thinking outside of oneself. Humanity really is a beautiful, shining force that has the power to change the world. There are loads of people living without food, clean water, and shelter, but when everybody gets together (in Palmares, Agua Preta and Marial, there were us 3 foreigners, people from the government, volunteers from Recife, members of the community, children and adults alike) when people get together and really work for a better cause, there is such a feeling of absolute success, of hope and of faith, that I´m sure there is no way humanity could ever amount to something less than spectacular.
Rotary has donated money and food to a community near to where I live, and this is where I am teaching English. I was at a Rotary lunch and listened to them talking about a school of sorts that they had helped create, and asked if I could see it. Marcelo, an especially involved Rotarian with the exchange students, took me there and showed me around. There is a small library, a computer and sewing room where classes are given, a playroom for small children and a gymnasium area. There is also a regular classroom. When I saw this, I asked Marcelo if there was any way I could start teaching English to a group of students, and he suggested that I teach 5 or 6 students from the ages of 8 to 12. I went to Livraria Cultura with him, a bookstore in the middle of the city, bought two books on English grammar and started classes the next week. So far I´ve given about 7 or 8 classes, and I am absolutely loving it. The children are hilarious, eager to learn, charming little bundles of humor and I can´t wait to give my lesson today after school :)
I started dance classes after 2 months here, and haven´t stopped since. It´s a passion that I didn´t know I had, but have discovered here and I´ve absolutely fallen in love with the diverse group of people there, the place, and the forms of dance. I am learning Forro, Zuci, Samba, Bolero, Salsa, Modern dance and a little bit more but that´s basically it. The people are warm, friendly, loving, patient and kind, and I am there sometimes up to 4 times a week.
I began mandolin classes last week (bandolim, in Portugues) and met a group of kids more or less my age who I´ll be playing with. I really enjoyed it, so we´ll see how this goes because I´ve only been there once so far :)
Today, I´m going to another dance place that teaches dances types that are only from this area of the country. They are really cultural and a lot of them have African influence and involve drumming. I am REALLY REALLY excited for this!
Also, I’m going to “circus” twice a week and learning how to do trapeze, tight rope walking, acrobatics, trampoline, clownery, and that really awesome thing where the two chords hang from the ceiling and you basically dance with them up in the air. It is REALLY neat. I love every second of it, and I’m proud to say that as a result of most of my cultural activities being rather physical, and how my beach time is while the sun sets or rises and I’m running, I have avoided the ridiculous amount of exchange weight gain without cutting myself the experience of the delicious food :D
Let´s see...I´ve been making the most wonderful friends and going out with them often. My family is wonderful, but I think I´m going to have to change soon. I am excited, because it will be a wonderful experience, but I´ve become really close with them and it will be difficult. I talk to the maid every night for at least an hour before I go to bed. My host mom is wonderful, but she´s usually pretty busy and so Edilene, the maid in the house, has really become like a host mother to me. I got lice here (the one and only time that I´ve wanted to go home was when this happened. I spent the entire night bawling my eyes out, asking if I could just shave my head, while they smiled, comforted me and told me it was normal. NORMAL! ugh. I almost died, really). Anyway, she helped me with that, taught me how to cook Brazilian foods, and has given me some of the most heartfelt advice I’ve ever received. I took the bus with her one Saturday morning and stayed the weekend with her family in Ribeirao, a city about 2 hours away from here by bus. They accepted me immediately as a family member and I felt so comfortable in her house that I’m dying to go back. She spends the week here, without her family, as a sacrifice for the schooling of her children. She is incredible and told me that she likes living more in this house now that she has somebody to talk to..I feel the same.
Palmares, Marial and Agua Preta are inland cities that were almost completely destroyed because of the flooding. There were bridges swept away, demolishing everything in their paths, and countless homes torn down by the force of the rivers. One Wednesday night, a Rotarian named Leandro called my host mom and asked if I would like to leave at 6:00 the next morning and travel with him and a group of other Rotarians to Palmares, with the objective being to translate for the English ShelterBox volunteers who had arrived that day in Pernambuco. Clearly, I readily accepted and began to pack. When I got there the following morning, we went to the sites and checked out the tents that had already been set up. Within 5 minutes, I was translating stories of the families that lost their homes for Chris and Laura from England. I spent all of 6 days translating for people from the government, families, children, workers, and Rotarians. On top of that, I set up ShelterBox tents from 7 30 in the morning until 5 at night. The work was physically demanding, mentally exhausting, but emotionally rewarding and pleasurable all at once.
The first family that we talked to had the most memorable story (although everybody told of occurrences equally devastating) and they touched me so remarkably that they will always have a place in my heart. Chris and Laura went to their tent and began trying to communicate with them, and after a few seconds called me over. In this tent lived a family of four (very few people in comparison to the other tents). The mother, father, elder brother and younger sister are all sharing this camping-like tent as a home and will probably stay there for one or two years, depending on the circumstances. They lived in a two story house on the first floor close to a river. During the flooding, the first floor filled up completely with water, and the mother and brother managed to escape while the father and daughter remained trapped inside. In a desperate attempt at escape, the father put Brunna, his daughter, on his shoulders and tried to swim out of the house. When they had almost freed themselves, there was an electrical shock that sent her father flying out of the house, and left her imprisoned inside. She stayed on the 2nd floor of the house with water up to her knees, without food or clean water, for three days and three nights. Alone. A 10 year old girl without anybody, frightened, cold and hungry, stuck inside while her parents tried frantically, the entire time, to free her. The mother described it as the worst 3 days of her life, and they expressed their fear with a sincerity that brought tears to my eyes. In the end, they managed to get her out and as a family they lived inside one of the many schools opened up for dismantled families throughout the flood destructed towns, until shelter box arrived and they were given a tent. I am without the correct words to tell anybody about this angelic family, because I feel as though I’m taking away their absolute purity by trying to stuff them into a news-like story. While talking to them, the mother said that it was her biggest dream to travel, to which the father replied that everything starts as a dream. I attested, explaining how Brazil was only a dream a year ago but I worked, studied and made it happen. I just want to spread their story. Traveling, for her, isn’t possible at the moment. If I tell their story, in a way, they are traveling to Wisconsin and whatever other places I happen to be able to post what happened to them.
While the demolition of their home is heartbreaking, the part that touched me most was their unbreakable strength. Had you seen how Brunna jumped up and down on the mattress inside of her tent when I explained to them that it was theirs to keep and have forever, seen how the entire family hugged us and called us angels, seen the absolute honesty and purity of the childhood that she still had gripped in her hands, the happiness, you would have never guessed that they had been through anything even remotely devastating. They are some of the happiest individuals I have ever met. They are generous, give while they have little, and this little girl…she really is so special. She has this wisdom that makes me feel as though she understands without needing to be told. I think she had it even before the incident of the flood. She can’t read, can’t write at the age of 10, but she understands life more fully than the majority of the people I’ve met in Recife. She stayed glued to my side the entire time I spent there. Her family gave me a little saint statue, that they said would always protect me, and Brunna had her father take off a ring of hers from a chain on his neck and give it to me. I keep it with me always, on a chain around my neck. She is so special to me and I will always think of her as a sister. When the time came to leave the site, there was a group of 10 or so children, yanking me back, calling me “tia” (aunt), and asking me please to stay, please to play with them a little longer. Brunna and a little boy were the two that stuck with me. I pointed to the first star that comes out every night in the sky, and told them that whenever they look at it, to remember that I am looking at the same star, thinking of them. Down and to the right of the moon. I don’t know if they remember, but I won’t forget. She told me repeatedly that I was her sister and she would never forget about me. I have been trying for the last few weeks to return, but haven’t managed just yet. I’m confident that I’ll go back when the right time comes.
I managed to cry only twice while working with Shelterbox. The first was during this story, and the second was while telling a woman with a falling house that we couldn’t give her, or the other 400 people in the same situation, the tents that they wanted because there had been a huge forest fire in the neighboring state that left hundreds of families homeless, and as she still had a home, she wasn’t the top priority. It made me sick to my stomach, but she understood and gave me a hug as I left, telling me good luck and thanking me for the time I took to look at her house. It was difficult because I had no say in the situation – I just had to break the news. It is really, really unfair. I learned a lot in this experience. Shelter box really is an incredible program that I would like to do more work with in the future. Upon my return to Recife, it was like being struck in the face. Here live millions of people in high rise apartments, without thinking of the poverty outside of their front door? I’m lucky to have grown up in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, where there isn’t stark poverty and I haven’t become emotionally hardened to it. I am not used to seeing people without homes. I feel sorry for them and have the desire to help, not run away. Who knows if I’d be different had I been raised here, where it is just another part of daily life.
It was really lucky, how this all turned out. About a week after I really became fluent in Portuguese, a few days after I had been dying for volunteer work, Leandro called and asked me to participate in this excellent opportunity. How could I resist? In the process, I met the most inspirational individuals from England who showed me what it is like to live the life that I’ve always wanted to. They guided me within the week we spent together, and I am surer of myself as a result of it. Everything that I want in life is possible, I just have to want it badly enough.
I’m not sure if the way I wrote about this did it any justice, but at least I tried.
As of now, I'm in the process of working on college applications (which are tricky from overseas) and as a result of this experience I think I would like to do something along the lines of Journalism, International Studies, Foreign Language and Literature, or Cultural Sciences. My first half of the year has gone faster than I could have ever imagined. I have loved living fully within every minute, and I plan on doing as much as possible in these next few months. I have little time left, but I will take full advantage of every second.
So far, this has been the best experience of my life. I can only hope that it will be the first of many travels. I am more confident, self assured, and perceptive than I was when I arrived. I'd like to say thank you to Rotary and to my parents for the opportunity.
All my love and gratitude,
Maddie
