First week in Brazil

(View outside the Fortaleza airport)

***WARNING**** Reading this may take much of your time. I just realized I started treating this like a journal and as I look back at this post I have decided from now on I will make sure this is more of a summary and keep a journal somewhere else :). No worries, or maybe to the disappointment of some (sorry), I have left my deeper personal feelings and girl interests out so this will not be 101 insights into Jason's soul!

Well, I don't even know where to begin with our adventures here in Brazil. It has been SO crazy! So to begin, my writing today was facilitated by a recent good turn of events. Today was my SEVENTH DAY in the same cloths and MY BAG FINALLY GOT HERE!!!! I shaved, brushed my teeth with a real toothbrush, got to put on new fresh clean everything... Que beleza! (How wonderful). Besides that, today was a good day because I got time to work on my Harry Potter reading time, I am now about 350 pages into number 7 and it is getting so good! I am glad I waited to the end to get into the books because I have been able to go through the story in one shot and not endure the excruciating anticipation that I can only imagine others had felt.

This week we have been attending the class we will be teaching as taught by one of the volunteers here. The center is really packed and that makes us happy. Not happy that so many people don't have jobs but that it must be well advertised. They have our carrier workshop, a self employment workshop, and they also teach specific training for being a waiter or waitress and can give a real certification to the participants. There are lots of restaurants around so it seems like a great thing they are doing. The people who come some times look pretty impoverished so I am sure it goes a long way. The volunteer that is teaching the class right now is named Paula and she does a pretty good job. Just like Sr. Simplicio (the assistant manager here who substituted the first day) she tends to be a little wordy and doesn't get the participants to do enough. We plan on having them doing all sorts of interactive activities and up and moving about. Things that are awkward, but once they have done them it builds confidence. Second, and almost as importantly, we just don't speak the language as well as them so long discourses just are really within our realm of good possibilities. It has good to be a participant especially since I have been walking around in stinky cloths with 5-6 days of beard growth (if you can call it a beard), I looked like I could be in need of a job myself :) .

(<--Yes, you can see our whole apartment from here!)

So besides the bag fiasco, and Hector's bag has gone back to Atlanta so he isn't in such a great situation himself right now though he has purchased some new cloths, we have had a fiasco about our "apartment". As I explained earlier, what was explained to us and what we paid for was to have a real apartment with a place to cook and study. We ended up in a hotel hostel/pension place where with our bags we barley have somewhere to walk. I love the older lady that runs the place and I enjoy chatting with her and the food is pretty darn good, though expensive, but regardless, we were supposed to be in a different situation so we pushed for a change. Hector, since he has A LOT of homework to do really pushed for a better apartment so he could study better, and I don't blame him. I was feeling really bad, like as was some spoiled American brat (if you have a rebuttle to this just keep it to yourself :) ), but it seemed to be the right thing to do. So on top of running a very busy center, trying to get our bags, and preparing for there most important weekend of the year, the job fair, he step an entire evening going with us to look for an apartment. He really liked what he got us. It's really close to the center, the church, it has the prepared meals, so he kept pushing that point and guilt tripping us but we haven't backed down and after some frustrated looking we found a place, right at the top of our budget, and he is still working out the details and hopefully he can find the money to put upfront (as the center pays for it first and then BYU pays him back at the end), and we are excited about it. We weren't pushing for it to be as nice as it i...two private rooms, two baths, a kitchen, balcony, on a higher floor in a high rise, two blocks from the beach... BUT it is what we could get, it's in the price range, and it would be absolutely wonderful!

(This is the view from the LDS Employment Center-->)

I have to admit, I am starting to have a really good time. Not that by any stretch of the imagination I was planning on having a bad time but considering the crazy circumstances, the complete lack of anything really familiar around me, and that fact I get attached to people pretty strongly, I handled the stress well and found all the silver-lining possible. Even if that meant stooping and getting a McFlurry from McDonald's today. Really, this is something that has really matured in me starting with my missions, I don't seem to get down easy at all and am just happy with life and its beautiful experiences. Not that I was ever a depressed or down person but I was more emotionally instable you could say I guess.

We requested and got "estroganafe" from the kitchen at the hostel tonight so that was really good. My Portuguese gets less rusty everyday even if I have a weird accents that one of the students poked fun at, it is well understood and that is what matters. I say it is because I am between accents, which I am and that makes a difference, but really I just have never been good and getting a good accent. I can never roll those dang r's! Luckily you don't really need to in Portuguese like you do in Spanish or the like.

I am hoping to start making it a more spiritual experience. I haven't, of course, had a chance to go to church yet, teach, and my scriptures had been in my bag though I used the internet. Part of (a large part) of wanting to come out here was to draw nearer to my Savior and I haven't forgotten this goal. I have felt the reassurance of the spirit however and I have felt guided and comforted. Love you all. If you got here, thanks for your interest. I am sure you are on my list of the top coolest people in my life... I should actually make that list... That would be fun. My abraco!

-Jason

("This is the place", hotel Malibu... makes it sound really good huh? I love the people here though, and the food can be really good.)

A stop in Atlanta

(Above: View out the window as we flew away from SLC). Well, we had mechanical problems with the plane in SLC so we got off late. We didn't get off until after 4:00pm which made us miss our flight to Brazil that day. It turned out well. I sat by a delightful lady named Susan whom shares many of the same values as I and we talked the whole plain ride over to Atlanta. It was good to talk about the need of Christian values in our lives and many other things. I got her contact card and plan on giving here a link (maybe you are reading this Susan :) ) to this blog as she said she would be interested in seeing how everything goes for me down her.

So, we ended up staying in Atlanta for TWO DAYS! This was OK though. An old friend of mine Cameron Boyce is living out there with his family right now and they live near the airport so we were able to sleep at his house that night and Saturday night before flying out late Sunday night. I had a really good time catching up with an old friend and relaxing before taking off to Brazil. It would have been nice to have another change of cloths. We weren't allowed to get to our checked baggage. I was able to wash the cloths I had on while there at Cameron's but I am on my 5th day in the same cloths right now as I right this message! Our bags should show up tomorrow.

Anyway, I need to go to bed. God bless.
Goto to the following link for the album with all my pictures of my trip that I will update frequently: http://byu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2135444&id=17821729 (If you have Facebook of course :) )
Back porch I got locked out on.








And here we have the beautiful Boyce home where we stayed while in Atlanta

Welfare Square-Take Off

Pictures from the weekend I took off for Brazil!

Here we are at the Salt Lake employment center. It's like the missionary map picture. Here is where we are going!






Here is the granary on Welfare Square. This is only such a small part. This is one of the smallest granaries and is dwarfed by the many others the church has for helping out the needy. The granaries in addition are one of the smallest parts of what they do at Welfare Square. It is truly amazing!












Here we have one of the rows of humanitarian aid supplies that the church sends out in emergencies. The church also makes a special porridge (EMIT I believe it is called) that can bring a malnourished child back to health in about 4 months. It is estimated that over 1/2 million children were save already in Ethiopia and the its surround countries because of this stuff!







Our time is SLC was really great. We stayed in U of U guest house (hotel) for the week and went down to the stake center near by to get trained during the week. We went to dinner at Buca de Peppi and it was delicious. Some of us one day went down to Gateway mall the the temple square area. It was a lot of fun.
We learned a lot about the carrier workshop program we are going to be teaching and what makes it so powerful. We help people to see the value in themselves and the value God sees and expects from each of them. When the recognize who they are and what they have to offer they can begin to make what we call "power statements" and they do so much better in interviews. Clearly there is much more but this is a part I really liked.