April 30, 2008 Wednesday

6:15 AM

Yesterday was the first day without rain here.

12:15 AM (Thursday) Notes from my journal...

Today was our first scheduled free day of the entire trip. Mike, Betty and I went to Escola Rotary to play soccer with the children, and take photos.

Betty and her husband Ed arrived here last night. Ed is a retired dentist who is also a Rotarian. He has come to work in the clinic. Betty is a professor of photography and she will be teaching four classes next week at the college across the street. Ed worked in the clinic, we took Betty with us.

We arrived at the school about 9:30 and we left at 10:30. So much happened in that one hour, we all thought it was about 1 PM when we left. This is the school with no playground. They have a total of 8 classrooms for 500 students. The children come in shifts: 7 - 11:30, 1:30 - 5, 7 - 10:30. Age is not an indicator of grade. Material understood is. So you can have some young children with older students doing more advanced work, and it isn't uncommon to have a 15 yr old fourth grader.

The important thing is keeping the kids in school and making sure they learn the material so they can be successful in their life.

But we went to play soccer. There were two soccer balls flying around outside. On top of roofs, over walls. Children running everywhere. I filmed video. Mike played. Betty shot photos.

After we got back to FE, we picked up Steve, who slept in on his free day. Then we got a taxi to the city center to buy some things for the district conference, like shirts and ties for the men, because we have two formal nights here.

For lunch we had cheeseburgers and coke by the Tapajos River (the Amazon was in the distance).

Then we went to the District Conference hotel to help stuff papers into folders. We got picked up at 3:30 by Irene a local Rotary Club President who took us to all of the schools on Tuesday. We were going back to hand out mosquito nets and toddler clothing to the SEARA school. See blog below.

We had 26 nets. 60 families need them. So we will get them nets some how. One of the German volunteers turned 20 today. So everyone sang Happy Birthday to Philipp. He invited us to his house for his birthday party in the evening.

I got to work on my blog for an hour. Yeah!! Then the computers crashed again. They hadn't worked all morning. It wasn't until later tonight that we found out that April 30th is TAX DAY in Brasil and 1,000,000 people got on the system to file their taxes electronically and it crashed the system and many more systems in the cities.

Steve, Mike and I did get a taxi to Philipp and Max's house. They are both volunteers at the SEARA school. The school keeps this house for its volunteers. It was a big family party. The three of us expected two 20 something boys to have a 'fratnerity' type party. But they had a bbq going. Lots of salads. There were moms and their children from the school program. The director of the school and her brother. It was a fun night. Lots of music and singing. Drinks in pineapples.

I got a new roommate tonight. She is with RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership) and she is working at the conference.

A final note about our wonderful FREE day...when we were at the school playing soccer, the children kept pointing to the sky. I thought they were thinking it was going to rain on us and I kept shaking my head "No". No rain. But Betty figured out what they were saying. "God Bless You." As soon as she said it, that made me cry. So did the kids hugging us and doing the two cheek kiss, asking for autographs like we were rock stars, asking to pose with us. They kept saying "we are Rotary too."

WHAT A TOTALLY COOL FREE DAY!!!!!!