For every season

 

We found a town where we would like to stay for a while and a favorite radio station. We are starting to think in Portuguese, no longer convert kilometers into to miles and can mostly drive around without a GPS. For the most part, we understand the situations we find ourselves in and the language that surrounds us and we are we now legal residents of Brazil. It seems like this is as good a time as any to close up this blog about our journey and focus more on learning Portuguese in a new way. Sorry mom, I know you like the blog. Our school work is moving to project based learning, so we will use this space to post videos but they will be em português. Beijos. 

Caught listening

A guy at dinner was telling an animated story about international travel. When he got to the the part where he overpacked and had to board the plane with his socks and underwear stuffed in his armpits, Carol and I both laughed out loud. Two things to note here. First, Carol and I were not seated at the table with the stranger who was telling the story that made us laugh. 😬More importantly, the conversation, and the eavesdropping, happened in Portuguese. 😁Our language learning is coming along.

Matchmaking in the days of big data

 

I was once in a meeting with a wanna be big shot from a Utah Senator's office who was making fun of Latin people for having a lot of names. The meeting was about using names to match governmental data sets. Because Utah health care forms only allowed for two or three names (first, last and an optional middle name) groups of people with different naming structures had a hard time with the forms and were consequently hard to match. For example, a Brazilian with a last name from each parent might have a hard time filling out the forms that don't specify which last name. When the forms don't work as intended, groups of people become hard to match. The hard-to-match groups aren't represented in research as well as the easy-to-match groups. This is a clear and simple example of racism, but it doesn't have to be this way. The medical forms in Brazil accept many names. It's functional and fun. Carol and I practice our vowel sounds in waiting rooms by reading the names on the screens. When a good one pops up, we point it out and are glad that Luiz Filipe Oliveira Coelho da Silva is every bit as likely to be included in a study as Carol Swenson is.