Week 1

Hi,

So much has happened in the first week. Feel free to stop reading if you get bored.

I started work on Monday. I took the bus. The bus stops have no name and no information whatsoever. They are just slabs of concrete. I was lucky enough to meet someone who spoke English and was going where I was going, so he showed me the way. When I got to the school, they weren’t expecting me, so I didn’t do much teaching that day, and the whole week was just for me to get familiar with the school. On the way back home, I got lost in a taxi for an hour. After calling my roommate five times and going around in circles, we finally got home. It turns out I live in the middle of nowhere. My neighborhood has more dogs than people, and the dogs seem to suffer some sort of excessive barking disorder.

On the second day on the way back home, I got lost again. Some guy who looked like a character from “City of God” said he would show me the way. He didn’t speak anything but Portuguese, so we had a one-sided conversation on the way. We took the scenic route and walked through a dilapidated favela. One does not simply walk into a favlea. Dangerous city is dangerous. I thought he was going to take me to his friends and steal all my stuff, but luckily he was honest. Before I got home, it started raining. It was still sunny though. I have never seen sun, rain and thunder at the same time. Speaking of thunder, the amount of thunderstorms in this city is too damn high. On the third day I did not get lost, but I walked for 1.5 hours so I can discover the area and prevent getting lost in the future. On Thursday, I had to do some administrative stuff which took a whole day.

Sidarta is an international school with about 300 students only. Students are taught English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Portuguese, as well as all the other subjects. It is a school for the elite. The tuition fees for one year are almost as much as I paid for my entire undergraduate degree at McMaster. The school has a great campus and the teachers are nice. The kindergarten teachers are very nice, if you know what I mean. I get to eat lunch there everyday. In Brazil, lunch is the main meal, so that saves me from cooking.

I will be teaching students from 7-14 years old. Although I am an assistant teacher, my English is better than the actual teachers. One of the English teachers was telling me about the going to the ‘bitches’ in Rio. That kind of pronunciation completely changes the word, and it reminds me of the Italian guy who went to Malta. Some of the students said I look like Edward from Twilight, and some of them call me Edward. I don’t see the resemblance.

Although São Paulo is quite expensive, food can be very cheap. For example, an all you can eat buffet costs CAD$12, a bottle of cheap wine costs $1.5, and, a pack of cigarettes costs $3. The prices are all including tax. Why don’t they do that in Canada? If you buy something which is $99.99 it ends up being $113. So sell it at $113 and cut the bullshit.

In the first few days, it was hard to communicate, since only the young people spoke English. I used a unique language which is a mix of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and sign language. I just use whatever words I know until one of them works. Sometimes it’s like playing charades. Later on, I found out that Portuguese is pretty similar to French, and that I can read it without much difficulty. It will take me some time to speak it well.

On Saturday, I went to Bauru, a city in São Paulo state, to visit my relatives. My grandfather’s brother is 83 years old. He came to Brazil 60 years ago, when he was roughly my age. In 60 years, he only visited Lebanon once. I am the first one from my hometown to come to Brazil and visit him. I have never met him before, but he was very welcoming. Today, I hung out with a friend I had met when I was on exchange in France.

In my first post, I forgot to mention that I was able to do this through AIESEC, so check it out if you are interested in doing an internship: http://www.aiesec.org/

My work here is done.

Bader