Hi friend and family! Tudo bem?… tudo bem! Today we woke up for our first day in the new city. We had breakfast and journaled in our hotel. Jonathan (our new translator/city of youth coordinator) met us at our hotel to take us to Hope Unlimited’s coffee shop/thrift store. The coffee was so amazing. The thrift store/coffee shop also had their financial department attached to the same building and we were able to get to meet all the great people who work behind the scenes at Hope Unlimited.
We then took about a 30 minute drive to the City of Youth (hope unlimited’s campinas campus). Once we got there Jonathan gave us a tour of the large campus which included showing us the cooking classes, baking classes, cosmetic classes, auto body classes, basketball courts, pool, and soccer fields.
After the show around we got to meet some of the children during lunch and they were such a joy to sit down with and make smile. Unfortunately they had to leave for class decently quick.
Our team then just took a little look around of ourselves and went exploring on the campus and found some little children in line getting ready to go to class and they were so excited to see us. They asked me why we were there and I told them “we came all the way from United States to hangout with you guys” and their eyes went wide and they smiled from cheek to cheek in shock. Once again unfortunately we didn’t get to spend too much time with them because they went to class.
We then went into the meeting room where there was a bit of a mix up on exactly what room we were going to get started on fixing up, moving things, and painting so we sat there for about an hour just braiding bracelets to handout to the children. Once we got our instructions we went to work quick and efficiently, clearing out rooms getting them ready to be painted. While we were working Philip (our field worker) comes to us and tells us we are going to the Brazil vs Paraguay World Cup qualifier match in the city tomorrow night which then of course caused our team to loose their minds and start throwing our ideas like painting our faces and bellies Brazilian colors for the game.
After we finished our work we were told that we were going to have dinner with some of the girls from the City of Youth at their community house, and since 2/3 of their busses broke down they needed to drop us off at our hotel to be picked up later. So we had to say goodbye to Luciano, our new friend/Hope graduate/ Hope Mountain maintenance man, because he was going back to Vitória and we weren’t going to see him again. We all shared hugs with Luciano and he learned how to say “I love you” to say goodbye to us.
We got dropped off at our hotel and immediately took off looking for some Brazil National Team jerseys for the game tomorrow without much success. So Chim(Tim), Cole, Derek, and I went on a time crunch mission to the nearest shopping center to buy some jerseys at the store. Once we arrived at the shopping center we were shocked at how nice and large it was, it had all the nicest branded stores and it was 4 stories tall. We went at quickly as we could we failed the time crunch mission because we were just a tiny bit late to getting back to the hotel, although some might call it a success because we got sweet Brazilian and Corinthians(local team) jerseys.
When Chim, Cole, Derek, and I arrived a tiny bit late to the hotel we were sadly greeted with a change in plans due to the bus being used we were unable to go and have dinner with the girls in their community house. We changed the dinner to Wednesday night. Although we were very bummed at not being able to eat with the girls tonight, Philip did offer to take us to all you can eat sushi which you can only imagine the excitement of the offer. We then walked to Sushi with Jonathan and Phillip and unanimously had the best sushi ever. After dinner we walked back, debriefed the day and went to bed.
We look forward to our time with the children tomorrow. Thank you for all the prayers we all appreciated it!
~Albert
How much sushi can Chim eat?