It’s been way, way too long since we posted anything, so I’m going to give a quick recap of the more interesting events of the last month or so:

• The US Dollar went crazy. Economic crisis? Not for us. When we got here in January, one US Dollar was worth about 1.8 Brazilian Reals (pronounced “HAY-ice”. No, seriously.). Over the course of the year, it slowly but steadily dropped, bottoming out at 1.55 or so about the time we arrived back here in August. It bopped around at about 1.55-1.65 for a while, until it suddenly went insane. It peaked at R$2.40, and today is at R$2.12. It has made living here much, much more affordable, which has been a major blessing.
• Speaking of blessings, lots of people have been very generous—thanks so much to all of you who are helping us pay for our transportation. We’re good now on paying for the (surprisingly expensive) flight out here, and are well on our way to paying for our eventual flight back. There are thank you postcards waiting to be mailed.
• We finished First Quarter. It doesn’t seem like we’ve been here that long (hence the unmailed postcards), but we have. Crazy.
• Goddard Publishing has its second book out—Edelsha by T. James Belich. It’s high-quality fantasy—geared for young adults, but enjoyable for those both older and younger. And if you prefer mystery to fantasy, my own After the Service is still available.
• Lorraine’s guitar is not fixed yet, but she is still able to play it. She played it for worship last Sunday, for the first time in Brazil.
• Last week, I went to a Brazilian national team soccer game at Maracana, Brazil’s most famous soccer stadium. (Lorraine did not go, because the game started at 10 pm on a weeknight, and she is more sensible than I am.) Soccer here is like a religion, and Maracana is The Temple. It’s a remarkable eperience: loud, festive and—recently—incredibly frustrating. Because Brazil, apparently is incapable of scoring a goal at home. The game ended in a 0-0 tie. That’s right—90 minutes of soccer, and nobody scored. One of the teachers here has been to three games—each one of them ending in the same ignoble way.
• We’ve started taking Portuguese classes at the school—after school, Mondays & Thursdays. This has been nice, because, while we’ve learned plenty informally, it’s nice to have a time set aside to actively learning a language–and to have someone we can ask questions about it. Lorraine’s skill at pronunciation is beginning to overtake my Spanish-enhanced vocabulary. Today at church, she startled a woman by telling her that she didn’t speak very much Portuguese. The woman, with whom Lorraine had had an conversation last week, had assumed she was Brazilian! (This rarely happens to me, but I suspect it has less to do with my language skills, and more to do with my… lets call it my melanin phenotype.) In related news, I got a Portuguese-English interlinear Bible, which has been really cool.
• Lorraine just baked a pie. Mmmm… pie.

I think that pretty much sums things up. We’ll try to do a better job keeping you all posted over the last part of 2008. Thanks to everyone who has been praying for us–we need plenty of it. God bless!

This morning, the maid next door leaned across her balcony railing and hailed me with a long string of Portuguese. The following conversation, I’m ashamed to say, was the best I could manage:

Me: Eu nao falo Portuguese. (I don’t speak Portuguese.)
Maid: (Another long string of Portuguese)
Me: Eu so uma Americana. (I am an American.)
Maid: (Looks shocked. Throws her arms out and utters another long string of words.)
Me: Eu nao intende. (I don’t understands. At this point my verb conjugation has suffered from my nerves, and I have used the third person form of the word “understand.”)
Maid: (More Portuguese, accompanied by sweeping motions. I now understand that she is asking if we want her to be our maid, too.)
Me: Nao aqui. (I am now blending Portuguese and Spanish, also using the word for “here” instead of the word for “now,” because I don’t know the word for “now.” Tim later tells me it is “agora.”)
Maid: (More Portuguese)
Me: Desculpe, desculpe, tchau. (Sorry, sorry, goodbye.)

There you go. My first conversation with a Brazilian.

When we were first looking to teach overseas, I was hoping to go to a Spanish speaking country. I took 5 years of Spanish in High School and even managed to eke a few college credits out of my AP Spanish class. Then during college I spent a couple weeks in the Dominican Republic, and found that by the end of the first week, I was pretty fluent.

So when we decided to go to Brazil, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. I hoped my Spanish would be a blessing, but I’ve heard that it could be otherwise. After doing some cursory studying of the language, it looks like speaking Spanish will make pronouncing things quite accurately a little difficult–the language sounds like Spanish, but it looks to me like the pronunciation has more in common with French & Italian.

However, I’m very confident that it will help immensely in reading. I’ve barely spent two hours studying Portugese over the last couple months, and just took the basic language test at Gringoes.com. I scored 18 out of 20. That’s better than I almost ever scored in Spanish class…