A Day in the Life

I apologize for the delay, but the advantage of this is I have a lot to tell you! 

For starters, I got a new job! And overnight I went from having time more desperate to be filled than a clingy girlfriend, to barley finding the time to sleep. 

A weekday looks something like this for me:

I wake up around 6 am and walk a couple kilometers to school. There I observe as my classmates attempt to do math with these unusual strategies, approach english like a chemical equation, and discuss Brazilian literature. We also do normal things like exercise and eat snacks, but mostly I just try to talk to my friends there and they ensure that I learn all the profanity and hip slang.




<--- Division 


I finish school at 12 pm and then run home so I can have a few minutes for lunch before going to work at a Bilingual school called "safe step". Fortunately, it's only a 12 minute walk away. Unfortunately,  it's up a mountain that's only called a hill when you're not climbing it. 

I work from 1pm-5:15pm with the most beautiful babies in the whole world. My job is to play with them and speak to them in English. The most challenging part is my kids are barely old enough to speak Portuguese, so even the most basic gesture "sit" could be answered with tears or more likely, just ignored.

Now that I've been with them two weeks most of them will respond to "Bye" or " I love you" but the process is very slow. I'm easily having more luck teaching my coworkers english. With the kids I say a work a hundred times before they repeat it, with my coworkers it's once.

Which has led me, someone who's envied people raised bilingual for years now, to question how much easier it really was for them. That is to say, perhaps learning languages is always hard, I mean it takes most of us 12 months to say a word in our first one, but we forget the struggle when we're young. Or maybe are just less embarrassed to make mistakes. 

So that's it. I spend the first half of my day struggling to express anything in Portuguese. And the second part speaking English to people whom, if they understand anything, are too rude to reply. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I also have Portuguese lessons from 5:30-7:00pm . By the time it's all said and done I'm so desperate to be able to express myself that I start spinning and the words come out so fast I can barely understand myself.

If nothing else these past few months, I've learned there's other ways of communicating, of course hugs, smiles, elaborate hand gestures, and impressionistic dances. But also that sometimes you don't have to say anything,you can just listen...

and pray the teacher doesn't call on you.