You just got to love Brazil
The first week literally flew by. And it had it all — laughter, tears, joy, confusion, clarification and lots of love!
I feel we have not only gained some friends, but a second family here in Brazil. CEDUC is an extraordinary place and everything a kid can wish for. I don’t think I have ever met as many hearted, lovely, friendly and joyful people as here and it is just amazing how heart filling this is.
Here are some impressions of our first week:
We have a lot to work on for the next week. On Friday we discussed the scope, that we will contribute and came to a great working model. We will work in a Scrum Mode having 3 Sprints, each with planning meetings and reviews. We also have defined a couple of nice to have items — we hope we can get them done as well.
The weekend was really great as well — we got to spend a little private time with some of the people from CEDUC — we went out for Samba and they showed us around the city. On Saturday CEDUC invited us to the Festa Junina — which is a very common party to have in this month. Everyone dresses up and we enjoyed this a lot. While this was a lot of fun — at the same time there are a lot of stories here that are very heavy on the heart being shared with us. We got to meet kids that live in a shelter — no way of return to their parents, as they use drugs heavily, raped kids trying to kill themselves and small kids where on of the parents committed suicide and they are living with their grandparents now. And I think it is important that these stories are shared as well, because it once again makes you realize how lucky we are and that there can only be one goal for our assignment here in Brazil — to help CEDUC as much as we can.
Now moving away from the sad stories — on Sunday we got to watch a football game — I’ve never seen so much passion anywhere else. It is a bit heavy on the heart, when you experience Brazilians in their football excitement, that we beat them so badly in the world cup!
