Quick Highlights

-a soccer game
-dictionary chats with my host family, topics: stereotypes about street children, why I don’t eat sugar as a condiment, HIV, food (alot), wine and family.
-language classes, my teacher is hilarious
-meeting alot of people

Today I had my first solo conversation in Portuguese with a stranger, the owner of a fruit stand near my house. This is exciting!

Right now I’m working on language lessons; hanging out with my host family and learning a lot from them; and just discovering life here. I’ve been to nearly all of the places/communities that Word Made Flesh partners with. Soon I’ll be developing a schedule of where I’ll be on a regular basis.

“[S]ervice is an expression of the search for God and not just of the desire to bring about individual or social change….As long as the help we offer to others is motivated primarily by the changes we may accomplish, our service cannot last long.

When results do not appear, when success is absent, when we are no longer liked or praised for what we do, we lose the strength and motivation to continue. When we see nothing but sad, poor, sick, or miserable people who, even after our many attempts to offer help, remain sad, poor, sick, and miserable, then the only reasonable response is to move away in order to prevent ourselves from becoming cynical or depressed.

Radical servanthood challenges us, while attempting persistently to overcome poverty, hunger, illness, and any other form of human misery, to reveal the gentle presence of our compassionate God in the midst of our broken world”

[Henri Nouwen, Compassion, p. 29-30]

This time next week I’ll be sleeping in my own bed for the last time in quite a while. My sublet (read hero!) moves in next Sunday and I will start sleeping on the floor in the meditation/plant room. I have to pack this week, bags for Brazil and some things for here.

I’m already unhinged, there are events my friends are planning that I won’t be here for. At work I get to skip meetings because I won’t be there to be part of the follow-up.

I think this leaving is different, it holds a lot of emotional weight, it might be the beginning of a whole lot of leaving and changing. I think that absence during change carries a risk of dealing with distance in relationships. I guess tonight I’m just pondering that and what it costs to go.

Tomorrow is my commisioning at Freedomize. I’m looking forward to it, seeing different communities of friends converge and worship together. It will be beautiful.

It’s been 6 months. I’m off to Brasil in 3 weeks. March 10. Between August and today, I got a better job, decided to do an internship with Word Made Flesh and  went to Mexico.

So the purpose of this blog has grown into a space to connect with friends, supporters and keep people up to date with my experiences getting ready for Brasil and while I am in Rio.

For all the details check my zine on the links, under Brazil Zine.

I love it there. I’m going next weekend with Peter. We’re staying at a little garlic farm, it’s in Sheguiandah. I can’t wait to get on the ferry and escape.

We’re going to spend 3 days there. And before we go, I’m going to see my best friend. We have been friends for 23 years! She moved to Peace River last year. If you know where that is you know why I haven’t been to visit, too cold.

Today the International Criminal Court indicted Sudan’s President Omar Al Bashir for genocide. He is charged with killing hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan and its Darfur region, and corralling the surviving women and girls into terrifying camps where they are being quietly and systematically raped until their peoples are destroyed.

The ICC made history today. For more info check www.hrw.org

I would get The Shape of the Beast by Arundhati Roy.

I read this little excerpt today:

I am in cafe heaven. Ahhh…

 The Riverdale Perk, Dark Horse and Mercury Espresso Bar, are all within a 20 minute walk from the place I’m housesitting. Planning to put some time in at these lovely gems this week. One element is missing tho from my little East end vacation: the docu-film shop on the Danforth closed 5 months ago. I lament. I found out from a florist a few doors down from the old shop. Another high-end women’s clothing boutique took their spot.

That’s gentrification for ya.

Lusaka, Istanbul, Prague, Kolkata, Dhaka, Ouagadougou… are all places my friends are going this summer, for weeks, months and years. I am home. As of Monday, over 10 friends are gone

Today I’m housesitting a place in Riverdale, trying not to be repulsed by the bourgeois enclave. Listening to Yael Naim, Coldplay and Amos Lee…Watching films: Juno, Zelary, 27 Dresses and next: 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days. Maybe Stuck next week. Gotta break it up with a little comic horror.

This is home, right now.

I miss it now. I miss the mornings when it was cool and the dust was not in my eyes. I miss getting up at 4:45 and waking 30 children and youth to start morning cleaning. I miss gently shaking little ones from their sleep and seeing their wide-eyed bemusement at my early morning energy. I miss going to the market in the early morning, having C2 and mung bean pastries at my favourite bakery. I miss the chaos of the market, the raucous shouts of tricy drivers calling out “lady, lady.” I miss the -culture in transition moments -  seeing an elderly woman in traditional dress, with geometric tattoos lining her arms, selling pechay next to a young man selling pirated DVDs from China. Pechay is a green that poor people mix with their rice.

I miss the cautious familiarity that came with the places I frequented. The sudden personal questions, “it’s 32p, are you married?

In the past week I heard from 2 of the students that I worked with in Bulanao. One has been terminated from the educational sponsorship program I worked for. The other wrote to tell me her tribe is at war with another tribe.  I also heard from a woman who is a social worker in Manila. She administrates a sponsorship program for children and youth in Paranaque and Pasay. They are short on funds right now. All I can do, from here, is to pray.