In their own words

Ezzie:

Welll I like it but recife has some cockroaches and all the car trips were a bit long for me. I do like the beach and waterparks, and the food, but I can’t wait to go back to school in Scotland.

I gone to the waterpark and I thought you would love it there. There’s an Abrigo [orphanage] and I wondered if you could give some money so you could pay for them to have proper food and stuff. I have a story about Katie [the cat] too, she is very cute and sometimes she hangs on the curtain and chews her food. She poos on my head. No she poos on her toilet tray and I just said she poos on my head to make you laugh. Sometimes she leaps on the telly when we’re watching it. That’s the story all finished I hope you like it.

Willa:

I like it in Brazil: the hotel. I like that is has a big swimming pool and it gives you yummy food. I like Katie so much and she’s SO lovely, cute and funny. And she bites my fingers and she plays on the computer and sometimes she comes and bees good to me. The things I don’t like - oh there’s something in Scotland I don’t like: Aylie only lets me play the things that she wants to. Ezzie being naughty to me. I got bitten by mosquitoes, I got lots of mosquitoes. . .

Magnus:

What I like best about Brazil is its nice and sunny, that we get to meet lots of nice people. I like meeting all the children at the abrigo, I like the kitten and Dora and Rosa. But I find learning Portuguese very difficult and I think Recife is just too hot. My recommendation if you want to live in Brazil is make sure you’re a rich person or its too hot and there are too many mosquitoes.

Maya:

I like lots of things about Brazil, the evening breeze, the beach, the music, and certain kinds of food – especially acaraje: a sort of bean paste patty with spicy shrimp filling and lots of chilli inside. But we’re living quite rough and it’s starting to take its toll. I can’t stand the cockroaches, at first they terrify me and after Magnus has killed them all I still feel all jumpy. If we were rich enough to be living in a nice air conditioned apartment things would be a little easier . . .

Ezzie and Willa manage to combine their 3 favourite passtimes: watching a DVD, swimming, and Katie the cat.

Sito Cruz

Since we last posted we’ve all been rather busy. Being ill - nothing too serious: rashes, temperatures, exhaustion and insect bites for the most part, but also going on small trips and having various adventures. Not long ago we were taken up with hunting for a car to rent. We soon realised this was going to be catastrophically expensive. No one here in the interior really rents cars so when you find the odd car rental agency the prices are obscene. We searched and searched all the towns and cities in the region and were about to give up when a young man in Santa Rita offered us his car for three months at a reasonable sort of rate.

It was a bit battered - the knob bit of the gear stick tends to come off mid gear change, the seats go back of their own volition and so on – but we took it anyway. So we have a car, we even hired a garage to keep it in (everyone here looks shocked when you suggest just parking a car on the street outside your house), and once we’d bought car seats for the children we were off. We’ve already been twice to Recife, to Garanhuns, to Paranatama, we’ve used it to get to waterparks and churascarias [bar-b-q restaurants] out on the highway, and it’s invaluable for getting to Santa Rita and back.

Ezzie and Willa are doing well - their appetite for water and water parks is as strong as ever – which is hardly suprising in this hot, semi-arid region. As the nearest water park to Lajedo is only open at the weekends we bought them a large plastic paddling pool, which lives in Santa Rita where there is more space for it. Here in Lajedo they manage to make do with a large laundry bucket each which they fill with water and sit in out in the back yard.

Willa continues to play long imaginary games with Katie the cat (who, quite strangely, appears to enjoy them). Ezzie has started Judo classes and loves them. We even splashed out on an authentic Judo suit.

Mid March we went drove to Sitio Cruz for the day to visit an old friend of Dora’s – a Franciscan monk who runs a ‘foot on the ground’ kind of liberation theology style seminary in the semi-wilderness of the surrounding countryside. It was a lovely day out. The ‘seminary/farm’ has been empty for some years, but Brother Juvenal still lives there in a simple house next to a small whitwash chapel. The surrounding terrain is fashioned into an ‘outdoor cathedral’ covered in fruit trees, and contains a row of ‘cells’ for novices.

It was a Sunday and we arrived along with the surrounding community, in time for Mass in the little chapel. After mass, during which the kids were so uncharacteristically well behaved that I wondered if Magnus had secretly drugged them, Magnus took Dora and the kids off in the car on a wild pot-holed chase through the countryside looking for a ‘cooked chicken’ while I stayed and had a very interesting talk with Brother Juvenal. After lunch, Ezzie and Willa went off to look for animals, fruits and strange looking seed pods in the orchard and I followed Dora and Brother Juvenal around the farm, listening as they reminscenced about past religious-political struggles and sensing the subtle, almost romantic chemistry between them.

A few days later I drove to Paranatama to spend the day with Ruben, a young ex-Franciscan novice turned school teacher who teaches religious studies in the state school. Paranatama is a small agricultural town, smaller than Lajedo. I spent an interesting day watching Ruben trying to extract metaphysical reflections out of the young peasantry in attendance. As slowly it became known that I was a foreigner, the classes became more and more dedicated to asking me questions about Scotland and England. The children were ubiquitously interested in three things:

1. Hearing me speak English. None had ever heard any other language other than their own being spoken. Someone asked me to recite the Lord’s prayer in English, and this then became the staple of every class.

2. Hearing how their name sounds pronounved in English: ‘John’ for Joao, and so on. . .

3. Getting my autograph. This was a silly ‘fashion’ that someone started and then everyone else had to follow. I had to sign every student’s excersise book and pose for photos. It was like being a film star for a day!

It has to be said that, so far, the nice liberation theology adepts of the region all seem to have time for me, while the church elite and politicians remain elusive. I must keep chasing them or the cockroach endurance test will be all in vain.