Update time!

Update time!  Yes, it has been far too long since you all had a real update from me and I apologize, there has been much going on these few weeks.

Firstly I am officially a teacher at the school, I have 125 students in my English classes four days a week.  I am quite busy creating lesson plans, seeing as we have only one elementary school English book and it’s for second year students much of my material is a combination of the second year book, and the systems that worked for me to learn Portuguese converted into English.  Keeps me on my toes.

Secondly, I am a teacher of art.  This was a bit of surprise to me.  I’ve always enjoyed art and enjoyed drawing and have been studying it as a small time hobby for many years now.  But I now find myself running an art class for high schoolers that meets every day.  We have pencils, pens, crayons and a little bit of paint at our disposal, so it’s another challenge to keep the ideas coming with our projects.

Working with the students in the high school is starting to create something that has been so hard to find in the first half of the year: friendships.  For many, many months here in Iauareté I found it very difficult to communicate with the high schoolers here.  Like all high schoolers they have their little nuances that you just have to find and work with to get to know them, but it makes it so much more difficult when you struggle to speak the language with them and the population of Iauareté tends to be somewhat closed.  But being in front of them day in and day out, trying my best to teach English in halting, erroneous Portuguese has given them time to actually be in the same room with me, if not necessarily by choice.  I have begun to have conversations with the kids before and after class about any old thing, I am starting to learn names and life facts about them and on the whole everything is brighter.

If I could use one word to summarize the month of August it would be: finally!  I finally have work of my own.  I finally can communicate, joke, listen and teach in Portuguese.  I finally am making the friendships that have been so illusive these last five months.  I am finally beginning to let God change me through this experience in the ways I wanted it too.  I finally am into a personal rhythm with my studies, exercise, projects and free time.  And finally I have the spiritual renewal I’ve been looking for!  This month has been a month of curve balls and challenges, from the lack of school books to the disorganization with the planning of my classes, to a very close encounter of the third kind with the world’s most venomous spider.  But each time I feel the spiritual wind at my back to keep me going despite how daunting it can feel all the time.

Three weeks ago was an experience I will never forget.  Once a year, maybe twice with luck, the padres go out into the furthest communities to give the sacraments.  These are the communities that live in isolation, getting news from Iauareté maybe once every two months and being literally a hundred miles or more from the church.  It was a journey into poverty of every kind, material, spiritual, educational, nutritional.  We made stops at some eleven communities; places were in some cases people couldn’t even speak Portuguese, or had no written material of any kind, or were going through a bad time and didn’t even have any fish to offer us for dinner.  It was humbling, sleeping in grass huts in hammocks, brushing your teeth in the river and drinking rain water.  Me and my seminarian friend Franciclei went to one place to take a dip in the river to shampoo off the day’s grime when a group of kids from the village followed us out curious by the fact that they’d never seen a white guy before, especially one as tall as me (I am generally numb to the fact that I am usually a head or more taller than anybody at this point).  So, me and Franciclei decided not to bathe and instead tried to teach them how to pray the “Hail Mary”.  This turned out to be downright impossible because the kids knew no Portuguese and had no idea what we were saying.  They were from the slave tribe; a tribe conquered in some fight a long time ago that now serves the other tribes in the area.  As slaves they learn hardly any Portuguese because they don’t get to go to school.  It was heartbreaking.  I was sad to leave that community.  I never want to forget what I saw in the jungle out there.

I am more than halfway done, almost at the two thirds mark.  I am very glad for the lessons I’ve learned out here.  They have been some of the most difficult moments of my life.  I was reading the blog of a missionary friend and just remembering what things were like in the beginning: to come in not knowing what to expect, to get beat down, pick yourself up, get beat down again and then realize that if you want to stay up you’ve got to let God pick you up.  That’s really been the key, I think.  That’s where it all goes in the end, really.  I’ve finally learned to let go of my desire to get up on my own and let God do the supporting.  I’m trying not to think too much of the future, but my time here is finite and I hope I can use it to the best of my abilities through the Spirit.  I have found my space here and now I want to get into a pattern of making the most of it by putting God first in all of it, where He always belongs.   

Helping hopefully and hopefully helping J,

Joe Cz…

P.S. A number of children in the middle and elementary school gave me a nickname: “Tio” (uncle).  I cannot help but find this downright adorable, walking down the hall and seeing little heads poking out of the classroom doors and windows going: “Tio! Tio! Tio!” until I look at them and give them a thumbs up.  It’s one of those completely intangible little happiness boosters.