Quinta-feida (Thursday)

Today I am totally exhausted. Nothing I tried kept the children entertained. Fiona, who had been with them the last several months, said they liked bowling. We make pins out of large soda bottles with water inside for stability and a soccer ball to knock them down. Well, all they wanted to do was hit each other with the bottles and managed to break one and dump the water out. So much for that idea. I brought really sturdy balloons and they popped them immediately. They finally settled down with some play dough. We made shapes and blobs and finally some cavalhos (horses) to gallop around on the table. Davi kept drilling me on the correct way to pronounce it, until I could do it to his satisfaction.

This is a picture of Jonathan. He is the newest and youngest child at Madre Teresa. He is one and has just learned to walk. He is doing a pretty good job of keeping up with the big boys, but loves to snuggle and be held. He eats like a cavalho! I never have trouble getting him to eat. But he usually falls asleep by the time we are finished.

Today Davi was testing my knowledge of Portuguese animals. He would point at a picture of a fish and tell me it was an elephant, or call a bird a cat, etc. He thought that was great fun to see if I knew the difference. Fortunately, I know all the animals.

But I am actually quite frustrated with my language skills. For all that I've studied, it seems like I'm worse off than last trip. At least then I knew I could hardly speak and now I feel like I should be able to do better than I can. My reading has improved and I can understand a lot more, but I'm still no good at speaking. I'm always missing at least one key word in a sentence when I want to say something. I still rely on a lot of hand waving.

Last night we had a capoeira lesson. Capoeira is a form of martial arts/dance that originated with the African slaves. It was originally a fighting technique that evolved into sort of a paired "dance off". It requires a great deal of grace, strength and stamina, which by the way, I don't have. I mostly made it through the opening warm up routine and followed the basic moves and kicks (quite poorly). I bowed out when it came to the part where people paired up for matches. I didn't think I needed to break or sprain anything in the first week. It was fun and a good workout, but not something I'll pursue. Maybe I'll be better at the samba lesson tonight.