The News

I moved again (hopefully the last time for a while)!  My new address is on my homepage.

No, you didn~t miss anything.  I don~t actually know how to play the guitar.  But.... I~m learning.  As if I don~t have enough other things to learn, I decided to buy a guitar and add that to the list.  In the search for books that I could actually read, I stumbled across free guitar lessons at the local children~s library.  (Yes, I~m successfully reading books in Portuguese that I was reading in 4th grade in English! Haha!!)  Anyway, back to my original point:  the guitar.  It~s been a great source of relaxation and decompression, and maybe one day my melodies will even be a source of relaxation for others too!!  ;)

Me and my new guitar in my new room in my new apartment in Vila Mariana, Sao Paulo.

So, where to start...  I~m still in Brazil, in case any of you had any doubts.  But, I am no longer living in blissful English-speaking ignorance with the two American Maryknollers I began my stint in Sao Paulo with.  I have moved AGAIN and am now living with two Brazilian women.  I love it -- speaking Portuguese constantly at home, having my own room, the new neighborhood and the park right down the street -- I even love that you have to babysit the washing machine in order to empty the water between cycles.  OK, maybe that~s going a little too far, but I~m sure you get the point.  I~m enjoying my new house. My apartment-mates are Vitoria, a psychologist, and Christina, a lawyer.  They~re both really nice, and more importantly, really smart -- in their professional careers as well as in their ability to understand what I~m saying to them in my ever-improving Portuguese.  The neighborhood is a big change from where I was first living.  I took a step up into the middle class when I moved, as evidenced by the cleaner streets, the decreased number of homeless people sleeping on the cleaner streets, and the abundent high-class-high-rise apartments.  The three most attractive aspects of my new location are:  the metro stop within 2 minutes walking, the bakery up one block from the apartment, and my favorite brazilian restaurant chain, Habib~s, down one block!  All in all, my most recent move has been a success!

Life outside my apartment has also been going well.  I am continuing to get involved with CISM, a project working with women in prostitution in the center of the city.  Sometimes I feel more like I~m getting "sucked in" rather than "getting involved", but I think this mainly stems from the fact that I have to go to administration team meetings every Monday! Yuck!!  I do enjoy my other two methods of inolvement, one observing a sewing workshop and a weaving workshop, and the other visiting the women on the streets as they work.  I am constantly impressed with the quality of products the women produce from the sewing and weaving workshops, and many women have chosen to leave prostitution and support themselves with the income they generate from making these crafts.  The work the project does on the street is to be present to the women working in prostitution, ask about their health and accompany any women with health concerns, hand out health information and condoms provided by the city government, and invite the women to visit the project~s house to consult with social workers or lawyers, or participate in the many workshops and therapy groups.

Leandro (my language teacher) and me in a quick photo shoot before my grammar lesson.

I went to the women~s prison again today.  It was an interesting visit because this time I introduced myself as an intern with the Prison Pastoral team -- that launched the women into a verbal gush of everyhting they wanted me to do for them.  Of course I didn~t know how to do any of it, like ckecking their cases, getting transfers, getting benefits while they~re in jail ...I didn~t even know how to go about getting a volleyball for one of the women who wanted something to do to pass the time.  As I was telling the million-th woman that I didn~t know how to handle her situation and to talk to one of the other team members, it occured to me that I was equally as helpless and powerless on the outside of the bars as they all were on the insidel!  A humbling but valuable realization for someone who~s supposed to be here to "help".

Thank you for taking the time to read about my experiences in Brazil.  I appreciate your support and interest in what I am doing.  If you would like to financially support me in my missoion work to help buy sewing and weaving supplies for CISM or support the Prison Pastoral in their accompaniment of women inmates, you can send a check made out to Maryknoll Lay Missioners (with "Sarah McLaughlin~s Mission Account" written in the memo line) to the address in the following link. Click Here. To learn how to support me in other ways, please click here.  Thanks!!