Monday, January 30, 2006

Puppy love

It seems that everyone is Brazil has a dog. We have already adjusted to falling asleep to the sound of dogs barking. Here, dogs are much more than just companions, they are the guards of the house. We've been told that the presence of a dog makes your home 60% less likely to be robbed. Security aside, the kids wanted to have a pet, so we figured a dog would be a good decision. (We have only seen, maybe, three cats since we've been here.) A neighbour down the street that works at PACA has a purebred Akita and a mutt. (The Brazilians don't have a word for "mongrel," they call them a word that means "dogs that go to the garbage cans." The result was some cute, German Shepherd-looking dogs with softer features. You can't sell mutts here as people are constantly abandoning dogs for others to take care of. We see stray dogs every day, and we've seen whole litters of puppies on the side of the road with their mother. (Strangely, nobody seems to be concerned about rabies.) So we got ourselves a puppy, and she has turned out to be quite a little bundle of energy. It took us a while to come up with a name. She was originally named "Thyme" as the product of "Sugar" and "Ginger," but we finally decided on the name "Maple." We got her when she was about 7 weeks old.



Saturday, January 28, 2006

Cary's first week at school

I must live a charmed life. On my second day of work at Pan American Christian Academy, the grade three class had an assembly. No big deal, right? Well, as it turns out, it happened to be one of the most significant assemblies in the history of the school. The grade three students were studying the soccer great, Pelé, in their history books, so they invited Pele to come and be their special guest--and he came. It was only that day that I ralized why he came. Pelé has two of his children in our school - and I am their principal! How neat is that? Because I'm their principal, I had the opportunity to talk to Pelé, along with the school administrator for about half an hour. He is truly a decent and kind man. I also got to have my picture taken with him and he autographed it for me, as you can see. It says, roughly, "For Cary, with love, Pelé."



Saturday, January 21, 2006

New Support!

We just got word that two of Cary's colleagues from when he worked in Pennsylvania have decided to support us on a monthly basis. This will add another $100 per month to our support level. This is a tremendous answer to prayer. We are still at less than 50% of our $2000 per month, but we are still waiting to see which churches will vote to support us, and for how much.

Around the House

Hooray, our original blog site appears to be functional again. Thank you for your patience as we move back to this blog again.

We've gotten several comments already from people who think that our home in Brazil is beautiful. We certainly agree. However, the inside is not nearly as impressive as what surrounds it. This first picture shows our veranda (deck) off the front of the house. From here we can see the lake and the city on the other side of the lake. But mostly we can see the remains of the jungle that only 25 years ago was all that there was here.

This is another picture of our house from the street; it's a bigger view than the one we showed you before. In addition to our huge garage, there is enough room to park two to four cars in the driveway. You can see the gate and steps on the right. The little basket on the pole is for garbage. People put their garbage in these so that dogs and other animals don't get into them before the trash men pick them up.

This is the view of the side of the house coming up from the gate. The walkways are all tiled and go all the way around the house. The door you see is the way into the living room, but we never use this door.

Here is a view of the back of the house. We have a little back yard (big by Sao paulo standards) that is filled with fruit trees. We have lime, orange and a couyple of other trees that I'm not sure of. We also have big aloe vera plants. The neighbour has a banana tree that hangs over our wall and there's a huge bunch of bananas that are nearly ready to be harvested growing righ above our walkway. The star of the back yard is the tallest cactus plant I've ever seen. This picture was taken from the balcony of the "back room" which I will explain later.

This is the cactus plant I was talking about. It's at least 20 feet tall, and it towers over most of the other trees in the back yard.



Thursday, January 19, 2006

More rooms

(This post has been brought over from our temporary site at www.sawatsky.blogs.com)
Now that you've seen the main part of the house, it's time to show you all what the rest of the house looks like. The bedrooms are all located in the back of the house behind these tinted glass doors. Sydney and Summer share a bathroom, but each daughter has their own room. Kilah's room was actually intended to be a den or family room, but we're using it as a bedroom.
Here's a picture of what the bedrooms look like. We're only showing one because the bedrooms all look nearly identical. Each bedroom (except for Kilah's) comes with a whole wall dedicated to built in closets and dressers. We have more storage space than we know what to do with. Summer and Sydney each have a huge desk with shelves in their room as well. Kilah's room, since it was designed for an entertainment center, has plenty of shelves to display her Lord of the Rings and Star Wars collections, plus enough room in the cabinets to store her clothes.
I've included a rough diagram of the layout of our house for you so you can get an idea of how everything fits together.
This last picture is of our garage. It's huge - a good driver could fit three small cars inside it. It would easily fit two SUV's. The ceramic tile made me laugh. Only a rich American would have tile in their garage, but here it's commonplace.



Monday, January 16, 2006

Come inside!

When we entered the house, we were pleasantly surprised to see that the people of PACA had not only cleaned up our house (which had been unoccupied for several months) but they had also scrounged up some basic furniture and supplies for us so that we could enjoy our first day or two without having to start shopping right away.

The house is all one level, and the rooms are large. The picture you see is of the dining area. The table easily seats eight and we could easily fit three of these tables in the dining area.

Here iare two views of the kitchen looking from the doorway by the sink, and looking from the dining area. The floor is made of ceramic tile (as is the floor in the dining area - we've already broken a few glasses.) The countertop is made of polished granite - which is very common here. The fridge and stove were given to us to use as long as we want as they were left behind by former employees and the school doesn't need them. The fridge works well. We've already had the gas stove worked on and it still has a faint gas leak smell, so we'll likely replace it soon. We have lots of cupboard space, which is something most Brazilians do not have.
This picture shows the area in the corner of the main room which is next to the dining area. When we saw this we thought, "What in the world are we going to do with this?" It is a beautiful bar with shelves in behind it that are perfect for bottles. This house was definitely made for entertaining - only, we don't drink. So we've converted this bar into a computer workstation and it has worked out really well.
The last picture for today is the view from the bar area of the rest of the living room. The living room, bar and dining area are all one big room. Again, the furniture, though worn, was a welcome addition. From the door at the end of the living room to the back of the bar is about 40 feet. The floor is made of expensive wood, as are the walls. Some of the wood in the floor, I'm told, is so rare that you can't legally buy it any more. The object was to impress as wood is very expensive to build with in Brazil. Most homes are made of concrete and plaster. Everyone who is native to Brazil does the "Ooooh-h-h, Aaah-h-h" thing when they see all the wood. Coming from Canada, our first reaction was, "Do you think they'd let us do something with these walls?" Aren't we ungrateful?

More is coming. You still have to see the bedrooms, bathrooms, and the outside.



Thursday, January 12, 2006

Our home away from home

This is the first look of the house that we had. It's not a very good picture, but I wanted you to get the same image we got at first. We unloaded the bus and carted all of our stuff inside. We live on a dead-end street ("rua sem saida" - which means "street without exit") and our house is the second to last on the right side of the street. The street is very different from most of the streets in our neighbourhood. All of the people who live on our street have the equivalent of a middle class American level of income. So by Brazilian standards, we live on a wealthy street. Of course, the first thing you might have noticed from the picture is the gate and the bars. EVERY house, other than those in the favelas, has bars on every window and gates. Even with the bars and gates, the chances of being robbed is well over 50%. Theft is just a part of life here. One of the biggest adjustments we've had has been getting into the habit of unlocking and locking everything multiple times a day. Those who live in the Maritimes can appreciate that when we lived in PEI we didn't lock anything. When we lived in PEI I had a car key (which only got locked when we went to those theivin' towns of Moncton and Halifax), a house key (which only got used about three times in three years) and a school/church key. Now I have a pocketful of keys that I have to take everywhere - what a pain! Many more pictures of the house are coming, but I wanted you to see this picture first. As good as this looks, it gets much better... (Please click on any photo to see it full-sized)



Tuesday, January 10, 2006

First Impressions

Eventually, we all managed to get comfortable enough on the plane to get to sleep. When we woke up, we looked below for landmarks but we ere flying so high that we really couldn't see anything of interest. As we approached Sao Paulo and began to descend we got a great view of our new city. It truly is a massive place with buildings going in all directions. We've been told that it is between the second and fifth largest city in the world, with some 20,000,000 plus people in greater city area (compare that to Toronto's 4,000,000 in the GTA and you get some idea of the population here.)
Of course, many things could have happened at the airport. We were told that the airport can be a very dangerous place since almost all of the international travellers come through the main airport, there is a lot of theft at the airport. We decided to wait for everyone else to get off the plane so that we could make sure that we weren't leaving anything behind. We also didn't want to hold anyone else up as we knew that we would be slow going through with all of our belongings in tow. Our first stop was at immigration where we handed in the paperwork that we had to fill out on the plane as well as our information from the Consulate in Montreal. Although our agent spoke very little English we got through okay. Our timing was perfect as our bags arrived just as we got to the baggage claim. A uniformed fellow offered to help us with our bags and led us to our third stop--customs. Although we were told that there shouldn't be any real problems since we were coming in as residents with our stuff, there was a very real possibility that our bags would be searched for new items that we might be trying to bring in to sell (especially computers or other electronics.) However, the man at the customs wicket simply waved us through without even asking to look at our passports. We paid no duties, no taxes, nothing--Praise God! At this point we were able to meet our Brazilian hosts from PACA. Two men, Mike Epp (Cary's boss) and Ken Fast (our neighbour) me us at the airport and helped us from that point on. It turned out that the uniformed guy who offered to help us with our bags might have been trying to steal them, but more likely than that he was just trying to make sure that he delivered our bags to their destination so that we would give him a tip. At that point we didn't have any Brazilian money to give to him anyway. (Only Brazilian currency can be used in Brazil, American dollars will get you nothing here.) So we got all of our stuff onto a PACA school bus and headed for our new home.
Along the way, we got our first glimpses of Brazil from the ground. It was a hot, sunny day (American Thanksgiving) and we could see very well through the large bus windows. The first thing that I (Cary) noticed was how different the vehicles looked. There was hardly a vehicle that I recognized, even though most of what I saw were Volkswagens, Fords, and Chevys. There were lots of the old VW Bugs, and the old VW vans. There are lots of pickup trucks here, but even a Ford Ranger looks really big here. The next thing we all noticed was the filth. Brazilians are not litterbugs, but the sanitation here is nowhere near North American standards. More than that, because there are so many vehicles around and there are no pollution controls in place on vehicles, nearly every building is covered in a blackish-gray soot. Any building that wasn't painted looked very bleak, but painted buildings looked okay since the rain washes off the soot. We didn't see much in the way of Christmas decorations. This mall had a very typical Brazilian Christmas tree erected. (By typical we mean artificial.) In fact we noticed that Christmas was not a big deal here at all until you get very close to the actual date.

Then we saw our first favela. Favelas are the shanty towns that house the poorest of the poor. They pop up all over the city with any construction materials people can find. We don't have any pictures of favelas yet, but some day we'll do a whole posting on what favelas look and feel like. Needless to say, this had an impact on us right away. By the time we got to our house, we were feeling a little overwhelmed and nervous. Things were not like what we had pictured in our minds. But then we arrived at our new home and our opinion of Brazil changed dramatically...



Thursday, January 05, 2006

First Flight

When we arrived at the Dallas airport, we were a bit nervous about our baggage weights. The rules changed due to the high price of fuel and instead of being able to put 70 lbs of goods in each checked bag, we could only take 50 lbs each. So we spent a lot of time tweaking our bags to be as close to 50 pounds as possible, without going over the limit. Of course, we were using a bathroom scale, so accuracy was an issue. As it turns out, the scale was off by three pounds (the bad way) but the lady who checked our bags told us that they allow for up to three pounds overweight without charging extra, so we were able to get all of our bags on the plane without any problems at all.
It was wierd to see the screen at our gate for Sao Paulo. Even though the process of leaving as missionaries for a foreign country had only taken seven months, it seemed as if it was never going to happen. Seeing this screen made everything seem like it was really happening.
As you can see from this picture, the girls were pretty excited to be on the plane. This was Summer and Sydney's first flight. We were able to arrange it so that we had two window seats so that the girls could get a view of takeoff and see the city lights as we left Dallas.
None of us had ever had a meal on board a plane before. You hear lots of complaints about the meals they serve on the plane, but I couldn't say how they were myself. This is what they look like, and actually it was better than it looked. However, I'm not a very fussy eater.