08/06/11

The wind had started howling last night and early this morning there was a huge rainstorm, the sound of which was only amplified by the metal roof of the compound I’m living in. It was very dark when I got up and the power was shot so I had to find my way around with a flashlight. I was skeptical that we would deliver bread at all today; after all Filipe would have to bike the few kilometers from Inharrime through the rain and mud to get to the bakery. We did end up going, but we left later and finished early as the power in the bakery was out and they couldn’t make any more bread.
I’m still learning the delivery route which, in my defense, is quite complex and often doubles back on itself. The hardest is the part of the route that goes through the winding, narrow dirt paths of Inharrime which, when you leave downtown, becomes less of a town and more of a sprawling village/forest. I am, however, learning to identify the different stops we regularly make. For instance, there is the “blue box” stop, the stop by the saw blade vendor, and the stop with the particularly big drop off from the highway. There is also the stop with the poster that says “Glass eyes don’t see, wear goggles”, the stop with the building labeled “Don,t kill me anymore,,”, the pink “GrandPa: Headache Powders” stop, and the stop with the little boy who says “hullo” and the girl Marina who Filipe seems to be trying to set me up with. There’s the stop across from truck that crashed and hasn’t been moved since, the stop at the bar by the lagoon, and the stop at the Mercado. And many, many others.
I sat in on my sister’s English Club again today. They were playing Scrabble again and out of the blue, one student spelled EROSION without any help at all.
Now that my sister is solid in Portuguese, she has started taking lessons to learn Xopi, a local language. I went with her to her lesson today even though I’m still struggling to get a grasp of Portuguese. At one point a tiny kitten jumped onto my lap and, despite a) being allergic to cats and b) needing to be wary of touching animals in general because that’s how my sister got tick fever last year, I let it sleep there for a while because it was just so damn cute. However, I grew less enamored when I saw a tick crawling across my shorts and quickly got both kitten and tick off my person.