Life

It’s blog time. Yeah, so this week was filled with danger. Like real danger. Luckily, it didn’t happen to me. Danger #1- Someone at the corner bar got robbed. Ironically the man doing the robbing was standing in the middle of the street and got hit by a car. Yep. Lots of robbing happens here. I think I mentioned in a past post the nail salon we go to got held up and everybody in their lost their purses. Someone also broke into the grocery store we go to by Valeria’s house and busted open the cash machine.  Anyways, this week the bakery we go to got robbed and last Monday someone robbed the apartment on the closest to the door on the 1^st floor of my complex. Broke the window which is crazy to me cuz apparently it happened at 11am.  We weren’t here tho.

The trippiest of all these events happened Tuesday. I left the house around a quarter to 9 to go to the gym.  I usually turn left down my street, but when I got to the sidewalk I saw like 4 people run past me from that direction. Two of these were old men in business suits and two were old ladies. I assumed that it was another armed robbery, though I thought it weird that one businessman would be chasing another as I assumed they both had jobs to be at.  In any case, due to my back-hand-sided upbringing, I decided to turn right and ask questions later. Turns out, I had witnessed the aftermath of a European bee attack. A swarm of bees entered a house with an elderly couple, 84 and 82, along with their two grandchildren and I guess a handyman. Apparently they swarmed the wife and the husband dumped a bucket of water on her and then they swarmed him. Everyone was sent to the hospital. The wife is still there; the husband didn’t make it.

Our landlord says that this type of bee lives in out in the fields but he’s never heard of them coming to the city. As it’s so dry nowadays though, they probably came looking for something to eat. If that’s true that might have something to do with why that particular house was swarmed (it’s next door to an ice cream store).  Unfortunately, everyone that was walking by became a target. I pray for those people and thank God for his favor and grace. Had I left the house 5 maybe ten mins earlier that woulda been me. My neighbor was nervous cause the windows here don’t have glass in them so if they decided to take a field trip further down the street it’da been a wrap. I insisted that Michol and I put screens on all the windows. All of the have them except the front because you can close it. Not gonna lie I still thought twice about eating an orange with the window open.

As far as the strike goes, the letras professors decided to teach strike or no strike starting September 3^rd. That week the Araguaína campus voted to end the strike and return to teaching on September 10th. Unfortunately the state syndicate did not feel the same way. In fact, it forbade Araguaína from teaching because it said that all 7 UFT campi need to be unified. In other words, they all need to pick a date to go back together. Where that leaves the students, I’m not sure. There was a meeting today to talk about it. Regardless, Michol and I start teaching classes for the natural science students (chemistry , math, biology, physics) next week. Should be informative for all of us.

Last but not least I met a really nice guy named Bernie. Michol met him when she went to the Amazon. He’s a recent doctoral grad spending 2 ½ months traveling Brazil. From Austria, he speaks German and English. No Portuguese. But he’s gotten by just fine. He says he can do all the things anyone else can just takes a little longer. He’s making his way through the Fulbright community crashing with many of us since we speak English and we’re free I guess. But he’s a great cook and super smart. He and Valeria hit it off well  talking about politics, culture, her time in Germany.

Anyways, that’s all for this week. I’ll be back next week hopefully with a less eventful post and maybe some pictures,lol. (Actually last week I hoped for more action and that is what I got so... I think I'ma leave the planning life thing up to God where it's supposed to be anyway and be thankful for the time that we get to be a part of it)