Second Update! :)

Recently I've seen a lot of Facebook updates about the heat waves and lack of rain in the states. Well, it's still on the opposite end of that here….This week we received TONS of rain and cold fronts. My make shift rain boots (a nice, white pair of snow boots :)) have never been so handy. The hill we live on is about a half a mile from the nearest road and it's  not paved. Needless to say, I'm very thankful for the boots! 

Although it's a muddy trek, we still went to our new project at Irval de Cima this week. Since it is still vacation time for the kids (they're not obligated to show up) we didn't want to start anything serious but wanted to use the time to get to know them better. We planned and played Minute to Win It games, which is a television game show that gives contestants one minute to complete silly and weird tasks to win money.Our students had to use a straw to suck a peanut and transfer it to another table, complete difficult puzzles, keep balloons in the air just with their breath, and move a cookie from their forehead to their mouth without using their hands! We all had such a great time watch and participating in the silliness. :) Vacation ends next Monday and I'm very excited to be on a normal schedule and  start our teaching. Lee Ann will start teaching photography with the older students. One of the organizers of the PETI in Reserva (another town close by) had the idea to create a calendar of the culture and landscape of Irval de Cima. She wants students to take the pictures, so we can create and sell the calendar as a fundraiser for PETI. While Lee Ann is busy with that, Matt and I plan on teaching the other students sports and gym games. Until he gets more of the language (which he's doing great at) I'll be coordinating activities which he can help with or things that we can do together. I, also, hope to be starting capoeira, dance, and math as soon as we get a good feel for the students and teachers. :)

When not planning for work or scrubbing mud off everything I own, I've been spending a lot of time with a woman down the street, Ines. We know her because her son works at the government office across front eh PETI in Imbau. She is a very kind and welcoming person, who despite her losses in life, continues to give to the community. This week she taught me how to crochet, which I've always wanted to learn since my grammy taught me how to knit. I am currently working on a small turtle, which will become a doorstop! I love learning new things and spending time with Ines!

Since all of the schools have been on vacation, the university bus that will be taking me to capoeira class has not been running. But starting next week I'll be back on track with practicing capoeira on bi-weekly basis. Lee Ann, Matt, our teacher Klecius, and I will be taking a trip to Campo Largo in two weekends to participate in an international capoeira festival, put on by my friend who's a capoeira master.

I pray that the bit of rain the states received this week refreshed the ground and your spirits. We continue to pray for all of you and your intentions! God bless.

Chegamos! (We´ve arrived!)

It may seem like no surprise to some, but I'm back in Brasil again! After 35 hours of car rides, planes, and multiple bus rides Lee Ann, my boyfriend, Matt, and I made it to Imbau, Brasil. Once we arrived, we only had one week to spend with Katie and Sarah Zimmerman, but we took advantage of every minute. Lots of friendships and memories were created before we had to send them home to the states.



Lee Ann and I are living in a small, concrete home close to the place where we work, called Peti. Thankfully, the Lord provided a very nice place for Matt to live right across the street!. We share our home with a wide variety of insects, a horse who lives next door (he hangs out within a few feet of my window), and a lot of mold BUT we are doing our best to make it a nice home. :) All of our neighbors are super welcoming and helpful and many speak a decent amount of English!



The Peti program that we have been working with the last 4 years has been doing very well. We have come to realize that the program has developed more than we had ever hoped and has good teachers that continue to help it grow. That being said, we started working with another Peti about 30 minutes away, which has about 80 regular students who are even more poor than the ones in Imbau. This new place is in a very small neighborhood called Irva de Cima. The students there are on vacation right now, so we plan to visit them every Tuesday and Wednesday to get to know them. We've been dancing, playing all sorts of games, and doing anything we can to gain their attention, trust, and respect. I am very excited to start teaching and working with them in a few weeks when vacation is over.



Once their break is over, our plan is to teach at Irva de Cima three times a week and spend the other two with our old students in Imbau and getting to know people in the community better. I'm excited and anxious to start all of these new adventures, but very thankful that I have Matt and Lee Ann always at my side.



Matt has being doing very well at practicing and learning Portuguese. The Brasilians and I are very impressed about how much he has already picked up by listening and studying on his own. I am so thankful that he is here with me. :)



Sister Rose and the other nuns are doing very well, continuing with all of their awesome work. They are as sweet and helpful as always. We plan on visiting them on a regular basis, even though sometimes it's a bit difficult to find a bus to take us to Telemaco.



I miss all of you in the states and hope you are well. We always keep you in our daily prayers. Have a great week!



Megan

October!!!!

Sorry about the delay in blogging, the month of October was nothing less than SUPER busy!
Everything has being going great with our new Project Discovery Center.We painted the two rooms PD colors and had the kids put their hand prints and signatures on one of the walls, SUPER COOL!!!!!!! Since finishing the painting, we moved some donated furniture and carpet in and bought some pillows, toys, and magazines! One room is used as a play/relax room and the other is for acadmics. I teach math classes with every kid in there on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and LeeAnn teaches English to some of them on random days.....it´s so cool! The kids love it and we do too. It´s a fun place to get away from the daily grind and the noise level in Peti!

I´ve started back up with teaching computer classes to the kids and that´s been going well too. Some of the kids are excelling quickly and others are learning the very basics of typing and using computers. To motivate them to come, I promised to make them American cheescake if they come to every session! Tomorrow is our last one, so hopefully everyone shows up so I have a reason to make cheescake. :)

The capoeira master came in the middle of the month to teach a course to our students. It was rainy that day, so not a lot of kids showed up (but the ones who did had a great time). He was a very good teacher and taught them a lot of new things. After the course, he invited me to visit him in Campo Largo(a city not too far from here) to practice more capoeira and get to know the work he does there. I decided to take advantage of this invite, so I went to a capoeira baptism in Curitiba last weekend and then stayed with him and his family until the following Wednesday. I had a lot of fun, did a lot of capoeira, and met some great people!

We are spending a lot of time, these days, planning for a field trip to the beach. It should be very fun; we are going to take 50 students and 20 adults to a nearby beach for a weekend! The only thing I´m not excited about is trying to choose 50 out of 90 students who deserve to go. :( But, I know God will help us make the right choices!

The most recent, exciting event, though, was LeeAnn´s birthday yesterday! Our little girl is growing up...the big 20! Katie and I took her out dancing on Friday and then to her favorite cafe for coffee yesterday. We, also, made a poster about the top reasons we love her! After that, we went to a friend´s farm with our English students to celebrate Halloween. They had a lot of fun activities including a scavenger hunt and slip ´n slide! I think she had an enjoyable and memorable day!

I´m sure there are other things I left out on this blog, but I don´t want to write everything, because I won´t have any stories to tell when we get home. :) We continuously pray for all of oyu at home and hope everything´s going well!

God bless...

Project Discovery Center!

This blog I would like to focus on our newest and most exciting addition to our program...a Project Discovery Center(PDC)! This past week the girls and I found a small two bedroom place to rent out and transform into our P.D. headquarters. There are two small rooms with a bathroom. The first room we decided to make a meeting/classroom. We will conduct our English and math classes in this space and the other room is a larger hangout place. We put a carpet down and will buy some pillows to put in there to relax. We, also, have a small dresser with lots of books, magazines, and games in it. The best part, though, about this room is the fact that we had each student put their hand print and signature on one of the walls....pictures are coming! Words really can´t explain how excited all of us are about this new outlet for the program!

Other than spending a lot of time getting the PDC up and running, we have been preparing ourselves for Children´s Day (tomorrow). We actually don´t have PETI tomorrow, because it´s a national holiday, but we had a nice festival for the kids today. We found a trampoline to put up for them and gave them a lot of sugar! (what´s a holiday without those things!??!)

We are, also, preparing to have a Capoeira master come to give a course to the kids this Saturday. It should be very fun and interesting how a master of the sport interacts with our kids!

Besides all of that, we have been travelling on the weekends and enjoying the mostly warm weather. We miss all of you in the states and continue to pray for you! Have a great week. God bless,

Megan

September

I can´t believe I´ve been here a month already...time sure does fly....especially since we´ve been SUPER busy here. Since my last blog, we travelled to Londrina, for a weekend, to see a friend, spent another weekend on a very remote farm, and continued to do al lot of things at the program and with capoeira.

Two weeks ago I started teaching a computer class to the students. I chose five students from each the morning and afternoon groups. I eventually want all the kids to take this course, but can´t do more than a few students at a time given the little resources/computers we have. Each student will take three classes with me. I start them off easy the first class bu having them type out a letter to someone in the U.S. This activity is to help them learn how to type and form complete sentences (which, believe me....it´s definately a challenge for most of them!) I realized after this activity that most of these kids don´t know when or where to use punctuation and many don´t even know what a complete sentence is! The second class, I teach them how to change the font, color, and style of writing for their letters. After that, I let them playing a typing game to continue helping them with that skill. The last class will be focused on copying and pasting items. I am going to have them search a famous person on Google and then have them copy a paragraph of information about that person and paste it onto a word document. They will then need to type that exact paragraph themselves and copy and paste a picture of that person, too. The whole point of the course is to get them practising their typing and computer navigating skills. So far everything seems to be going well and they enjoy it, too!

The next thing I started at the project was math practice. I gave every single PETI student a math worksheet to complete to assess their skillls. The younger students received a 21 question addition sheet and the older students completed a 100 question simple multiplication paper. After grading and categorizing them, I found that many of the students seem to know their math facts, but I plan on using flash cards and games to continue to help them. A lot of the kids actually had to use their fingers or make tallies to complete the questions, so I would like to make time every day to work on-on-one with some of them. All in all, they did very well and I´m very proud of them. I can´t wait to kick off another new portion of the project!

Next to all that, we had a capoeira demostration this past Sunday, in Telemaco. It was culture week and we brought some of our dedicated students here to participate in the festival. They loved being here with us and being apart of something so important! I enjoyed it too, but I realized that I need to start training more on my own if I want to get better this year!

Katie and I have both been sick on and off. I still blame the silly weather for that! One day it´s hotter than can be and the next day it´s cold and rainy....:( I am trying to get over a cold right now and want to do it quickly, because we will be travelling to Santa Catarina (another state) this weekend for a capoeira demonstration.

The last thing I am excited to post about is the family prayer nights I´ve been apart of here at Lourival´s house. Every Tuesday night, they invite all of their family memebers here to pray for an hour. It is very beautiful and I´m so grateful that I get to be apart of it. if anyone has an special intentions you would like us to pray for, please let me know! God bless you and have a great week!

"If you make the Lord your refuge, if you make the Most High your shelter, no evil will conquer you." Psalm 91;9-10

Second update!

Hello everybody! Making a second update in two weeks feels great...hope you´re loving it just as much as I am! I just can´t believe I´ve been here almost 2 weeks already.....I feel almost all the way accustomed to being back here. But, I have to say it´s been very different from when we were here last year. I´ve had to meet a lot of new people that we work with and people Katie and Lee Ann have become friends with. I am trying to form relationships that they have known for the past two months! But, all I need is a little time and I´ll be back in the game. :)

This past weekend(my 1st weekend here) went really well. I went to and English school on Saturday, where 8 of our students attend an English course. It was fun to watch someone else teach our students and see how much they´ve progressed! That night, Katie and Lee Ann took me out with friends for my birthday, where we danced the night away! The next morning, (my birthday) Leandro´s family had a bbq for us where we enjoyed a lot of food and conversation! My birthday was enjoyable and I am very thankful for everything God has given me this past year.

We have had a good week with the kids...the first few days were very hot and then we got a lot of rain and it´s cooled down since. We do capoeira and music lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Monday and Wednesdays we have been rotating groups of students between English lessons, morals class, and soccer lessons. Tomorrow (Friday) we will have a "store" open for the kids where they can spend the fake money they´ve earned by good behavior and participation. We will sell things like soccer balls, make up, toys, and clothes.... they love it!

Other than that, I was sick yesterday because of the temperature changes and trying to get accustomed to everything here. I feel a bit better today, but have been trying to take it easy. It´s hard to eat so healthy and be active all the time! :)

Every morning, I walk to Lucas´s house and LeeAnn, Katie, and I have morning prayer. Each time we have intentions, we pray for all you amazing people who continue to support us in the states. Thanks for you love and prayers!

God bless you,

Megan

BACK AGAIN!!!!!!!!!

WOW....it´s been awhile since I last wrote a blog......let´s play catch up.....
Katie, Lee Ann, and I finished out a wonderful year in Brazil last December. Upon returning to the U.S. we all got jobs and worked hard to raise more money to return to Brasil. The two of them came back in June and I stayed in Fishers all summer, working to raise money.
I finally returned to Telemaco Borba, Brasil this past Monday, the 22nd of August.
I travelled here by myself, but found it to be a smooth and safe trip!

Since returning a few days ago, I have jumped right back in to our routine with the students, capoeira, and friends! The students I had last year were excited upon my return and to my surprise, there are many new children apart of the program! I was, also, very excited to learn that the PETI program, that we are apart of, hired professional teachers to teach and help our students. How exciting!

Since Tuesday, I have been to two capoeira classes (I´m soooo sore!) and two days at the program. We spent yesterday at a school for children with special needs. Our students enjoyed interacting and playing with these kids and it was nice to see them be so helpful and polite!

We have some fun plans for my birthday this weekend, but other than that, I am going to enjoy being back here and living with a wonderful family! (Leandro´s family) I hope and pray all of you in the states are doing well and enjoying the nice weather! I am going to attempt to update my blog every week, as to keep everyone informed about things here.

God bless you and have a great week!

Megan