Unfortunately, my time in Brazil is coming to an end, but luckily, the last couple of weeks were probably the best so far. For the past three weeks, I was able to conduct research on the education of children who have sickle-cell disease in Salvador, Brazil, and it was such an amazing experience!
It was surprising the improvement of my Portuguese. With the family I had been staying with since I got here, it’s been challenging, but when I don’t understand a word, for example, they tell me in English. However, the family I was staying with during the time of my research spoke no English. So when I didn’t understand something, they either repeated the same thing or would explain it with a bunch of other words that I also didn’t understand. With the days, I started realizing how much better I’d gotten at speaking and how much those long explanations in Portuguese had helped.
I also discovered something else during these weeks. When I’m working on my computer I usually have the lights turned off since I don’t really need them. After being in Brazil I’ve started to notice that maybe I have the lights off more often than usual. However, one funny thing I’ve learned is that (I will generalize considering it was already 4 Brazilians hahaha) Brazilian’s love to turn the light on whenever I have them off. They find it so funny that I have the lights off and I find it so funny that already 4 people, some more than once, switch them on. So what I’ve started to do is after they turn the light on, I ask to take a picture of them next to the switch. I’m starting to think I’ll miss this 🙂