Through a city that's falling apart, On a night that rises and clears....

I'm sorry about the lateness of this blog, but the activities of the mayday weekend really threw my game I must admit! This week was busy busy busy, and I loved it. What I did not love was the fact that Becky has now left, well semi-left, I have spent my first night alone in my bed (as it was only when Becky arrived that I was promoted from a place on the floor to my very own room, and double bed!). In anycase, we must bid goodriddence to Rebekah Long, and I think that some of the children have taken it even worse than me. Sad days, As Hannah said in our Monday morning prayer meeting, Becky has worked hard the whole time she has been here, and I don't think I've heard her complain about the work once. She's a machine that one, and she will be missed (although I will see her tomorrow and Thursday, so I should probably leave the homage until next week).

Not surprisingly I cannot for the life of me remember what happened last week up until Friday. I think it involved scrubbing of floors where we had maybe forgotten to lay things down while painting. I do remember going to bed quite exhausted several nights, although I don't really know why, because I'm pretty sure I spent a lot of time just watching the others work, using the kids as an excuse to bow out of the hard manual labour. So the week culminated in our weekend activities. On Friday, we looked over the project and our hearts sunk a little bit, because of the mahoosive May Day festival that was being held at the seminary on Saturday, we had to make sure that the project would be presentable, both inside and out, and I can tell you that it definitely was not presentable. But, on top of this we had to bake cakes to sell at our stand on Saturday, and there was just me, Becks, and Hannah, things weren't really looking up. So we spent the morning running around shops trying to get ingredients and such like, and started baking, and cleaning, and then a miracle happened, our friend Johnson arrived. And he did not indeed, arrive alone! He arrived with not just one friend, but 11!!!! All of whom he was friends with from the army! I don't know if you quite understand what exactly that meant for us, but I will spell it out for you, 12 strapping young men to cut down the forest that used to be lawn, to paint, to wash, to scrub and everything else that needed doing meant that thanks to these God Sends, we were able to do everything we needed too that day, as well as finish the baking, and I even made it to seminary in the evening! I don't think I've ever been that happy to see military personnel in my life.

After seminary I managed to return to take Becky along to her surprise (not so much of a surprise, as they never are) party, a big barbeque that the Pastor arranged with all our project workers. A good time was had by all, I played charades in Portuguese (Can I also point out that I managed Garden Gnome within my allotted time!) and ate a lot of good meat. I think we managed to climb into bed in the early early hours of the morning, only to climb out again about 2.5hours later to go and set up for the May Day festivities. And festivities it was, we worked from 8 until 5.30, but in a good way. We had set up our own stall and ran between that, and meeting and greeting people, entertaining the young kids, taking young kids back home when we failed to entertain them enough, running around the whole community trying to find places where drinking water was still available, and carrying it back to the seminary and cheering our football teams in the football tournament which was the highlight of the event, of any event in Brazil. Our project had about 4 teams entered in the 5 aside 15minute matches, and the football started at 10.30 and eventually finished at 17.30. The football tournament mainly consisted of church teams of adult men, so as some of you know, it was quite a tense afternoon, but it is with a little pride that I mention that although our younger boys teams got knocked out quite early on, the final was played between two of the teams from our sister project in Cha da Cruz! The other churches were less than impressed, and didn't stay to watch the final. I had lost my voice from the cheering, and the kids had managed to get through quite the amount of plastic bottles because they used them as drums and played music on them while the girls sung. It was a good day, and we managed really well on 2.5h sleep. What we managed less well was the birthday celebrations for one of the other striders in Candeias that night, but that was nice as well. I don't remember the last time I sat in a nice restaurant and had a glass of wine and some chat that wasn't completely centred on how to modify the behaviour of problematic children/adults at the projects. By Sunday, my sleep deprivation seemed to catch up with me, but we had a lovely day at church, an amazing evening service, and even better acai on the beach in the centre of the city.

I know it sounds as if I just seem to be at party after party, but it's not all like that of course. The past weeks have been quite tough projectwise. The enforcing of rules has meant that a lot of children are dropping out of the project and are not allowed to return. Unfortunately the children here are not used to having any rules or authority in their lives and struggle to understand the concept, and it's not an easy lesson for them or us. We have lost some of our favourite kids (they are all of course my favourites, so that is bound to happen), but we cannot let them stay at the project if they refuse to obey the rules, even with the rules it is chaos on some days. Even so, we still have new kids arriving most days, and we are looking ahead now, towards July when we are going to have 4 camps of 80 kids each, and a couple of step teams. All of this requires a lot, A LOT or preparation, that I'm actually enjoying, but it is going to be quite time consuming.

On a more personal note this week. We have not had water for over a week now. That's right. No water, Recife is struggling, this means no showers and no clean clothes. I thought you might enjoy that piece of information :)

Love and Blessings to All