Well, I made it to Brejo da Madre de Deus, my new home for the next 10 months or so! I will be living, at least for the foreseeable future, with Betty, who has worked with MCC here in Brazil for 25 years, the last 8 of which she has lived in Brejo. We tried to find a host family for me to stay with but were unable to, but I think living with Betty will be great. We’re still going to keep our eyes and ears open to host family possibilities, since that was an experience I was really hoping to have, but in the meantime I am excited to learn as much as I can from Betty. She’s worked on such a huge variety of projects here, it’s really incredible, and I have a feeling I’m going to be learning a lot!

We got to Brejo on Monday around lunchtime, and then we accompanied Betty out to the village of Lagoa de Pedra (Rock Lake), where she was delivering the metal forms used to construct cisterns, shown here:

After dropping off the forms, we got to explore some more of the area, and the highlight was definitely seeing all the different rock tanks they have developed there to collect and store water. There are tons of rock formations in the area (hence, the name Lagoa de Pedra), and they’ve constructed tanks in these areas by either building a concrete wall to close off a natural collection area or by excavating the dirt and plant growth that has filled in sizeable holes in the rock formations which naturally collect water. The number of tanks and the volume of each was really quite astounding; a single large rock formation could support 5 or 6, if not more, rock tanks, each holding thousands of liters, like this one, which Joel was about to go for a swim in…

MCC has done some work with constructing rock tanks as well, and I will likely be involved in some of that during this year. Such a simple idea, but so valuable, it’s awesome!

The other part of my first week was going to a couple of meetings with Betty. The first was here in Brejo with an association that works with sustainable development that she is president of, CONDESB (Conselho de Desenvolvimento Sustentavel de Brejo da Madre de Deus), where I was able to meet a lot of people from the area who I will be getting to know better as the year goes on. The second meeting was in the city of Petrolina, which is about 10 hours by bus from Caruaru, which is about an hour from Brejo by Toyota (I’ll have to write a separate post about Toyotas…). So we took an overnight bus to get there, and the meeting there was with an organization called Associação Brasileira de Captação e Manejo de Água de Chuva (ABCMAC, translated as the Brazilian Association of the Capture and Management of Rain Water), of which Betty is also the vice-president. This meeting was to work on planning a conference that will be held next September, which they have every 2 years, to discuss various aspects of the management of rain water resources, primarily in semi-arid regions such as this part of NE Brazil. Unfortunately I will be gone by the time the conference happens, but I should be able to help a little bit at least with some of the planning. After the meeting we visited some other areas around Petrolina, including a huge agricultural area with somewhere around 50,000 acres of sugarcane! The whole project was made possible by a series of canals built in the 70’s to reroute water from the San Francisco River. Here are some pictures from our visit:

The landscape without irrigation

One of the principal irrigation canals

With irrigation – sugarcane! And lots of it!

So that’s what I’ve been up to recently. Also, things can still be sent to the original address I gave in Recife and I will get them eventually, but I do have a new address here in Brejo at Betty’s house, so here it is:

Rua Jose Batista Queiroz Sobrinho 3 – Apto 1 Andar
Centro – Brejo da Madre de Deus – PE – 55170-000 - Brasil

Alright, I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures from Lagoa de Pedra; fantastic scenery, I love it here!

Wow, that last few days have been very eventful, and I do not have time to write about everything now, but... stay tuned for more on the following:

1. Our final Portuguese class was Friday. 6 weeks down, lots to learn still! But we're getting better, to be sure.

2. Last night was my host sister Kallyne's huge 15th birthday party; it was awesome! Quite the extravagant party, felt more like a wedding reception than a birthday party!

3. Tomorrow I'm off to Brejo da Madre de Deus! I can't wait! I'm going to be visiting some projects in the Brejo/Monteiro (where Joel is going) area during the next couple days, before jumping into things on Wednesday (whatever that means...)

So, that is all I have time for now, I'm afraid. I'd appreciate your prayers as I completely shift gears here and start out on a whole new aspect of my SALT experience. It's going to be a whole lot of NEW, should be great!

Love you and miss you all, more later,
Mike

Thank you to all of you who have been praying for me these past couple of weeks, I finally have confirmation on where I will be living and working during the coming year! On Monday, October 27 I will be moving out to the town of Brejo da Madre de Deus, about 3 hours northwest of Recife into the interior of Brazil. This is where we visited a couple weeks ago, so I’m already a little familiar with it, which is nice. It is a huge relief to finally know where I’ll be going, let me tell you!

That said, there are still a lot of questions and things to be worked out. MCC is currently looking for a host family for me to live with, so I would appreciate continued prayers that a good host family can be found, especially since I’ll be living with these people for roughly the next 10 months! As far as work, I am still not sure what my dad-to-day work will look like, but Joel and I have been talking with Keith, the MCC country representative, and he’s told us about a lot of possible projects which sound pretty cool, and he’s very confident that there will be plenty of work to keep us busy. So, I will likely be working on the following projects, in no particular order; cisterns (my original project, I will still do some work with them), subterranean dams, rock tanks, dry latrines, and other drinking water, irrigation, and sanitation related projects. Also, they need some CAD (computer aided design) work done, so I will be helping out with that, drawing up some basic floor plans, and maybe even getting to do some design work for a new building MCC is hoping to add on to one of the schools they work with (let’s see, what do I remember from my structural engineering class…?).

Needless to say, I am very excited to get started on all this! I’m anxious to see what my day-to-day life is going to be like, and excited to meet my host family, and all that good stuff! We’ve got a couple more weeks here in Recife, finishing up language classes and visiting a couple more MCC projects, before heading out, like I said, on October 27.

Thanks again to all of you for your wonderful support, I will keep you updated as I find out more!

This past weekend we had a retreat with the entire MCC Brazil team plus families, which made for a pretty large group. We all headed out to a hotel/little resort about ½ an hour outside of Recife for a couple days of relaxation and fun. We had a couple meetings, but mostly this was about taking it easy, which was just fine with me!

The place was equipped with a swimming pool and multiple soccer fields (of course), as well as foosball, ping pong, and other games to keep us busy. I was very happy about the amount of soccer that was played, haha, I loved it! We played at night for the most part, since it was cooler then. One of the games I was going for a header but instead collided heads with Jura, and ended up losing one of my contact lenses. But, it all turned out for the best when I went on to score a hat-trick (3 goals) that game, including one on a header! Maybe I should play with only one contact more often? Not that I can really take much credit for the goals, all the work was done by Eduardo, the husband of Eileen, one of the North Americans on the team. He was incredible, and would get everything set up and I would just happen to be there too and he’d pass to me for the easy goal… but hey, I’m not complaining! Suffice it to say it was a lot of fun!

I think the best thing about the retreat (other than the soccer) was just getting a chance to talk with some of my fellow MCCers here and get to know them and their families a little better. The first time I met most of them was at the end of my first week here when my Portuguese was, how shall we say, somewhat limited? Since a lot of them are native Brazilians, this made it difficult to get to know them at that point in time. So it was really great to get to actually talk with them and get a better feel for the team during these few days. Not that my Portuguese is fantastic, but I can at least hold a basic conversation and start to get to know people, which is very satisfying. I can’t wait to work more with the team and develop these relationships further.

learning how to dance forró with Rosane

the music for the evening

Marcelo and I playing some foosball

and, of course, futebol!

“America has the best films, but Brazil is known worldwide for having the best novelas.”

That’s the general idea I got when I interviewed a friend here about Brazilian television. For those of you who don’t know what a novela is, it’s basically a soap opera, but here they garner huge followings and run during prime time, as opposed to the day-time television we’re used to in the U.S. Pretty much everyone watches them here, so I figured I might as well do the same and try to familiarize myself with them.

As far as I can tell, there are three top choices here for novelas; Tres Irmãs, Negocio da China, and A Favorita. I haven’t watched Tres Irmãs very much, since my family doesn’t really watch it. Negocio da China is a rather new novela, and I’ve seen a few of the first episodes. The stories of these novelas is so convoluted that I’m not sure where to begin, but the story behind this one is that there’s this Chinese guy (who speaks Portuguese, though…) who steals a bunch of money from a bank or something in China and then has to flee from the authorities. He’s about to get caught in Portugal when he slips the USB drive he used for the heist into the bag of some traveler from Brazil. So, naturally, he escapes again and has to come to Brazil in search of his money. Obviously, there’s a ton of other things going on, with convoluted love stories, a mom holding secrets from her son about his dad… you know, the usual. It was as I was explaining this back-story to Joel that he told me I should write a blog post about my novela knowledge: say no more!

Now, of the major novelas, A Favorita is definitely the top choice for my host family and others who I’ve talked with here, as well as the one that I now know the most about. I don’t know what Andrea, our main contact at MCC, would do if she missed an episode! I think A Favorita is an older novela, not sure how long it’s been running, but jumping into it with limited Portuguese hasn’t been the easiest thing. However, I’m slowly getting to know the characters (there are tons!) and I’m starting to understand what’s going on little by little. Family tensions run high in this one; a mom stages a kidnapping of her daughter, then poisons her father later when he gets suspicious; a woman is cheating on her husband with his best friend, and they are then discovered by several different people who are close to both of them and who are then sworn to secrecy; a wife finally leaves her abusive husband, who then starts to drink himself sick while trying to win her back; a rifle toting husband and his confused wife are somehow involved in all of this; I could go on, but you get the idea!

Needless to say, I’m hooked. I can’t wait to start understanding a bit more of these shows as my Portuguese improves, that’s my real motivation to study and work on learning the language! I’ll be sure to update you all on any big surprises that get thrown our way!

Yesterday I completed a quest that I undertook, according to my best estimates, somewhere around 1 year, 9 months, and 13-16 days ago. It was on one of those days at the beginning of Christmas break, at home in Olympia, when my parents and I went to see A Christmas Carol at Capitol Playhouse (I think that’s correct; check me on this mom!). I forgot to bring a book to read while waiting, so I wandered over to Orca Books, the local used book store which happened to be just down the street.

The previous semester at Calvin I had read an interesting play in my philosophy class titled “The Last Man in Hell,” in which the two principal characters are Hitler and Ivan Karamazov. I won’t go into detail about the play, but it was a very intriguing read, and I enjoyed it very much and would highly recommend it. Anyway, after reading this, I became curious about the character of Ivan Karamazov. “What am I missing,” I thought, “in this play, not knowing the background story on him?” I decided I was going to read this Brothers Karamazov, which I remembered my sister reading, and see what his story is.

So, I walked into Orca Books and, after a little browsing, found myself in the Dostoevsky section. (It took me a little while to find it, seeing as I wasn’t totally sure how to spell Dostoevsky…) Staring at the massive novel in my hands was the first time I realized the seriousness of my undertaking. I was not deterred, however, and walked back to the theater a proud owner of The Brothers Karamazov, as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (On a side note, I’m not sure what other translations are like, but this one proved relatively easy to understand, and I enjoyed it a great deal, and I feel like a novel like this needs a good, readable translation in order to stick with it.) I’m not exactly sure what my parents said when I returned with this brick in my hands, or even if they said anything, but maybe they didn’t have to…

I struggled with this book for the next year and a half. I would periodically have the time and energy to get into it and stick with it for a while. Then it would rest on my shelf for a while. Then it would sit on the desk next to my bed, teasing me, begging me to indulge. Then it would get covered with other books, lying almost forgotten at the bottom of the pile. I read a number of other books during the time I was “reading” The Brothers, including the following: The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama, The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, The Actor in Me by Simon Callow (for my acting class…), Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul by Kevin Corcoran (for my metaphysics class that I was auditing…), and I’m sure there were several others which I can’t recall now.

By the end of my senior year at Calvin I was about halfway through the novel. I had made a dent, but things weren’t going too well. I had forgotten much of the back-story, or at best only remembered bits and pieces. I wasn’t invested in the book; I was detached from the characters and reading for the sake of finishing instead of for the joy and anticipation of wanting to know what happens next. So, at the beginning of the summer, I deliberated and made a difficult decision: I was going to start over.

Turning back nearly 400 pages is not an easy thing to do, let me tell you, and I had my doubts at first. However, the summer gave me the opportunity to invest more time in the novel, and I made quick (relatively speaking) progress. I remember when I passed the point where I had started over; I was so excited, and quite proud of myself for having reached that point in less than 2 months since starting over. Obviously, there were times in this second attempt where the reading would slow, or cease for a period of time, but overall I did a much better job of sticking with my dear brothers, and I became more and more drawn into the story.

Not having finished the novel by the start of my SALT term, I decided I was going to bring it along; how could I stop now? With “only” a few hundred more pages to go?! My extra time in Akron gave me ample opportunity to read, and I made a lot of progress. Then when I got to Brazil I pushed it to the back burner for a while. But now, the last couple weeks, living with my host family there are times when I’m home by myself with not too much to do, so I eagerly picked it back up.

And, shall we say, the rest was history! I finished the final pages yesterday afternoon, finally learning the outcome of the trial and the incredible story of the Karamazovs, those alternately wild, passionate, irrational, devoted, logical, innocent, and engaging brothers. What a story. If you have the drive and the will to push through some of the slower parts in the first half of the book, you should really give it a go. It’s an incredible story, a glimpse into life in 19th century Russia, with countless moments that will most certainly make you reflect on your own life and your own convictions.

Well, this has become far too long of a post, but I just couldn’t keep my joy to myself at finally having accomplished what I set out so long ago to do! It is a very satisfying feeling. I think during the next couple weeks I will go back and reread selected parts to help solidify some things in my brain and help me to digest a little more what exactly transpired over the course of the novel. Thanks for listening, and I’d love to hear of other experiences people have had with this novel, as I’m sure there are some good ones out there!

Done. Boo-yah.

Saturday, October 3

Later this month is my host-sister Kallyne’s 15th birthday. For those of you who don’t know, a girl’s 15th birthday is a very important milestone in much of Latin America, marking a transition into adulthood, and is often celebrated with a very extravagant party. Unfortunately, Kallyne’s celebration is not until October 25th, which is just after we are scheduled to leave Recife for our assignments, so I’m not sure yet if I’ll be able to attend. However, they had another celebration this past weekend, a more informal one, a chorrasco, basically a big barbecue, which included tons of great food and lots of games.

The party started at 9 AM, and it took us about an hour and a quarter to get there, so we had to get a pretty early start. During the morning I finally got to play futebol (soccer)! I’ve been wanting to play ever since I got here but just hadn’t had the opportunity yet, so I was very excited. I wasn’t disappointed either, as just about everyone who stepped onto the field was a quite accomplished player, from my 12-year old brother to my host dad, and everyone else in between! I think I held my own though, even scored a couple goals, so all in all it was a good time. However, I am not accustomed to playing barefoot, and my feet were definitely feeling it afterwards. I have a massive bruise on my right food where I accidentally kicked Erika’s host dad’s foot. Really hard. Whoops.

We played a number of other games, and had little team competitions, they were pretty hilarious. There was a pool there too, so I went swimming briefly, which was very refreshing after a substantial amount of futebol. Stories were told about Kallyne, some of which I understood, haha. And lunch was delicious; tons of fruit, rice and beans (of course), and at least five different types of meat off the grill. Basically I was in heaven. I definitely ate way too much, and my attempt at soccer after lunch was not the most successful…

We hung out there for much of the afternoon before returning home. All in all it was a very fun day, I was glad to be here for it. Kallyne’s actual birthday is this coming Saturday, with the more formal party, as I said, on the 25th. I think I might see if I can stick around here an extra day or two to be able to go to that, I think it would be a really cool experience, not to mention a lot of fun! So we shall see about that.

One of the games that we played; very exciting stuff!

Erika and Ester taking a break on the swings.

Sunday, October 5

“And everyone went to his own town to register.”

That was the thought that kept popping into my mind as we made our way across Recife to my host dad Valdemir’s mom’s house. Sunday was Election Day here in Recife, and everyone had to go back to where they’re from to vote. I don’t really understand that, not sure about all the details, but suffice it to say that the streets were very active and the public transportation rather crowded (not like that’s anything new though). Little pamphlets for every candidate possible were basically raining down from the skies, covering the streets, with kids shoving more into your hands despite your assurances that, really, you can’t vote!

We finally made our way to Valdemir’s mom’s house, whose birthday it also happened to be on Sunday. There I met a lot of new people, more of Valdemir’s family, and we had a huge meal and wonderful dessert to celebrate the birthday. Worked out pretty well, since I guess everyone had to go there to vote anyways, so why not make it a big celebration! While we were there, we occupied the time by watching Argentina vs. Ukraine in the indoor soccer world cup followed by the movie Cast Away. If there’s any movie where you really don’t need to understand the dubbed language, that’s it!

So that was my weekend, capped off with church on Sunday night of course. It was a very eventful weekend, a nice change from the sometimes monotonous routine of the week. I also am getting to know my family more all the time, and this weekend was definitely a wonderful opportunity for that. Everything here continues to go well, we’re basically halfway through our language training, only about 3 more weeks here in Recife. Still not sure exactly where I’ll be heading/what I’ll be doing after that, which doesn’t worry me but can still be a little frustrating at times. Your prayers for that situation would be greatly appreciated, both for patience on my part and that wherever I end up would be a good fit, somewhere I can use the gifts God has given me to serve him the best I can. Thank you to all of you for your continued support, love you and miss you all.

So last night a bunch of people were over at my house, for a little birthday celebration, and one of our family friends, Deyse (pronounced like Daisy), who I’ve gotten to know a bit, asked me if I would want to try driving her motorcycle after dinner. I wasn’t sure, as it had been a while, and I was a bit nervous, but I decided I should give it a shot, since I knew I’ll be riding a lot during the coming year. So I said sure, and after dinner we headed out to the street to her motorcycle and off we went. After driving the motorcycle I realized that I accomplished an incredible number of firsts for me. I will list them here:

1. First time driving a motorcycle here in Brazil (obviously).

2. First time driving a motorcycle with a kick start, which took a bit of an adjustment at first.

3. First time driving with a passenger on the back of the bike. Apparently you’re not supposed to do this until you’re very comfortable driving on your own…

4. I have my motorcycle license but this was my first time driving somewhere other than a parking lot. Yup, you read that right. The class I took in Michigan earlier this summer to get my license was conducted solely in a parking lot, so this was my first experience with something called traffic…

5. First time in 4th gear! In our class we got to 3rd gear once. It was phenomenal.

6. First time driving a motorcycle at night. Good times!

7. First (and hopefully last) time encountering an insane political rally while driving a motorcycle. If you’ve read some of my previous posts you know what I’m talking about here: cars, motorcycles and throngs of people waving flags, blasting music, lighting fireworks, and taking up the entire road. Not the best atmosphere for a new driver… I opted to pull over and wait it out. A good decision, I think.

So all in all a pretty fantastic experience! I can’t wait to ride more! MCC had Joel and I get our motorcycle licenses before we came because that will be one of our primary modes of transportation during our assignments, so I’m pretty excited for that. It was good to get on a bike here and refresh my memory a bit; I was definitely a little rusty. We’ll see if Deyse lets me ride it again, given the number of times I stalled when we were out there… Other than that, though, I think I did alright, and had a blast doing it!