October 28, 2012
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Family
I get up at 6 and Marlene has bread and cake and fruit sitting out on the table to grab for breakfast. I know they do not have a lot, but they are sure putting out everything they have for me. I do not know this kind of hospitality: I need to learn from them. I have devotions and then walk 15 minutes up the side of the hill and past the dogs and horses and donkeys to the main road. I wait for a kombe or bus to take me to the International school. After teaching English I come back and work on filling out individual forms for each of the children in Living Stones and doing house to house visitations.
I wanted to have someone help me, so I can fill them out in English, and they do the Portuguese part, but volunteers are few and far between. And once I do find them, getting them out to where I am at is almost impossible. So with many grammatical problems and spelling mishaps, I am doing them in Portuguese as well.
The thing is, Brazilians work hard to survive (the ones I am working with, and the ones willing to volunteer). So anything that is outside of working to survive (like my projects), I have to work extra hard to make happen. Even if they want to help me and believe in what I am doing—it won’t happen unless I am in front of it, pushing. Pushing hard consistently. The minute I drop the ball it is all gone. And that hurts because it feels like it is all on my shoulders. Heavy.
It takes me about 30 minutes to do the interviews with the mothers and kids, and then another 30 minutes (at least) alone to fill out all the forms for each child. I sat under the tree outside the church finishing the forms while the kids “did my hair” and put flowers in it to make me beautiful. I got nine done this week; my goal was 20.
Zezinho, the father, told me his story. How his father had left before he could remember and his mother was sick and then remarried and begun a different family. He was “given” to another family, but they were abusive and so ran away. Then he found the sea. “The sea has everything,” Zezinho said. “I lived up and down the coast, digging a hole in the sand at night—covering myself with it when it was cold. Climbing coconut trees and eating them with fish or other fruit.”
He started selling fish, then started catching fish: put on goggles and grab a harpoon and dive for the big ones. Garlic, he says, strengthens your lungs for long, deep dives. He traveled to Rio and Sao Paulo and learned to be a mechanic and got a job with a guy who had a house in the interior. He went to visit for a week and has been here 20 years so far. “I loved the mata (desert/forest area inland Brazil).” Zezinho continued, “And I met Marlene. Never really wanted to settle down, but it was so easy with her—it worked. We had two daughters and here we are today. But it isn’t the sea.”
He sat on the couch across from me, talking. He likes to talk. I was trying to fill out forms. We were talking about education, travel, mythology, whatever. “I didn’t have time for much school.” He said. I didn’t realize until further in the conversation what that meant: he had started living on the streets by the time he was 11, so didn’t even finish 2nd grade. He took care of himself. And then, once he was grown, he sat in night classes, heads taller than everyone else, and finished through 11th grade. He learned to read.
Who are these amazing souls walking all around us every day? Everyone has a story, and they all have beautiful and tragic parts. At Living Stones this week we talked about prayer, and praying for the world and others…I have a book with pictures of children from around the world. I bought it out for this father to see. He sat there for over an hour with his reading glasses, looking at the pictures, for the rest is in English.
I watched him, as I filled out my forms. He was once a street child. Now he has a beautiful family and grandchild, and opened his home to this American girl who decided she wanted—needed to do something different. I watched him and though of how he’d learned to read as an adult. I wonder what other adventures he has lived. And I realized that right now was another adventure: sharing life with a stranger, seeing pictures of places he’d never imagined or knew. When he finished, he handed me the book, turned on the TV and started watching a documentary about dogs. In 20 minutes he was snoring, looking just like my dad when he falls asleep in front of the TV.
