I am doing all sorts of things; somedays i help the cooks in the big house and others i help with maintanance. My favourite cook is called Luisa and i have managed to establish that she likes ABBA (and introduced her to Take That- Lovely you should be proud!). I managed to find out she likes ABBA through the one phrase we have mastered. Conversations mainly go a bit like this:
Me: You like music?
Luisa: Sim (yes)
A long pause
Me: You like Guns´n´Roses?
Long Pause
Me: You like ABBA?
Luisa: Sim (yes)
Very Long Pause. Luisa starts to peel a carrot
Me: You like carrot? (This has an accompanying point)
Luisa: Nao (no)
She then looks very thoughtful as we both wonder how to develop this conversation. After a lot of thought.
Luisa: You like (points to carrot)?
As you can tell our friendship is coming a long well. We are happiest when washing up to Waterloo, singing along (note some of us dont know the correct words and make noises in certain places - this is not Luisa). The other day i almost had a heart attack as she brought the hose into the house put it on the kitchen floor and turned it on!!! This is how she cleans the kitchen. I have to leave when she does this as my Britishness makes me feel that it is very wrong to have a hose on in the kitchen. Its all dry and clean when i get back. Luisa has reassured me (though a translator) that now i have learnt how to clean well and properly (the Brazilian way) i will be able to earn lots of money when i go back to Brazil. I haven´t the heart to tell her that we prefer cleaning to a moderate level and not having to replace the chairs, plaster and cupboard doors every two years.
I wont bore you with the details of my maintainance duties today as well, but Luisa´s husband Ailton runs that gig, he does not try to understand me but talks at me quite a lot. Sometimes he asks people to translate and they ask me if i know how to rake. Well thats a hard one to answer. I mean who doesnt know how to rake? But then again, is this professional raking and am i getting out of my depth? Well, i´ve been raking most of last week and they havent fired me yet. However, he (and Gabi another mainatiance worker) have both put effort into teaching me how to rake properly. I cant understand the difference so much to their amusement am persevering with my method.
Lastly, Claire (cool British girl we live with) and I went food shopping for the camp on Friday. this involved me buying innumeral vegtables in the veg section in close proximity to two gobsmacked 15 year old boys. I was obviously a curiosity and after 20 minutes of hovering near me he eventually asked if i spoke Portuguese. I´d barely managed to answer in the negative before he scuttled off to his friend to let him know he had spoken to me and that i had the power of speach, albeit a different langauge to him. So i carefully choose my 30 potato´s, 25 tomato´s and 40 onions, etc etc before Claire came back and told me i had the wrong potato´s. I was already paranoid about the fact that i was spending such a long time hanging around the small veg section, but this became even worse when i had to un-bag these 30 potato´s and stack them back up in piles. This was exactly what these boys were doing right next to me. I adventually became paranoid that these people would think i had a mental health problem because to all appearnances i had entered this shop, started hanging around (spending a LONG time) in one place and then was copying what the shop workers were doing, stacking potato´s. Having stacked the 30 potato´s carefully back up (and this takes a while- seriously see how long it takes you to choose 30 nice potato´s next time you are in Tesco´s- its much longer than you think), i then had to move on and choose 30 new potatos from the correct section. I was giggling perfusely by then and quite embaressed. I bet this helped me blend in even more.
Below are some pictures of us trying out the forest activities that the child use at the weekends for team building and problem solving.
The spiders web. Each child has to pass through a different gap and hence some have to be lifted through. Xss is a little scared to the spider here.
The ´air conditioning escape´. Each of the kids has to go through this tyre. The bigger ones have to help the little ones. Getting up there was easy. Getting down again required some thought. P.S you can see my war wounds in this one. The bugs have made it impossible for me to not declare war. I´m still currently losing, but am in for the long game.
Xss demonstrating that it is easy.
Me on the ladder, probably Jacobs ladder, every ladder is called Jacob. You have to move the bamboo slats one after another and pass them to the person in front to make it up the hill. XSS had already fallen off her but pretended it was because he wanted to take a photo.
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