What's our role in

What's our role as PFs?
John, Jennifer and I with IICD joined the Child Aid Project as members of Humana People to People in Quijingue about 1 month ago.
Quijingue is the second poorest city in Brazil and there are so many small local communities. We've been working hard from 8am to 5pm more than 6 days a week in our project area named Lagoa da Barra.
The more time we spend with people in our comunity, the more our role is changing and expanding step by step. Let me explain that feeling with some examples.

1st week "interesting aliens"
We've been taking charge of 12 families per person, which is 36 families in total. We visited each family one by one bringing along our
interview sheets. We tried to introduce ourselves in Portuguese. In my case, I spoke quite basic and simple sentences with quite unique pronunciation.
Most of all famillies have 4, 5 or more children, but they don't have any income except around 120R$ a month from the governmental program
"Bolsa Familia". Our area leader, Fabio helped us a lot with writing down all their names and with their replies during interviews. We also
introduced ourselves by giving a small presentation about our countries in front of more than 100 people in their main social place, the
"Igreja". We are "interesting aliens" for them, so we had children, teenagers, even adults, at our doorstep each morning, every break, and until quite late at night. They wanted to talk to us, to see our house, to ask to get drinking water. It was pretty tough to establish a good distance among the local people, and to have our necessary private
time. We felt sorry when we had to decline their requests at times, but we noticed that we couldn't felt sorry when we had to decline their requests but we noticed that we shouldn't be too nice.
drinking water. be too nice to them. That feeling was one of
leads to think about what we should do and what we can do for them with true consideration.

2nd week "active megaphones"
They have 3 schools and we helped to clean up the nearest school, and also helped to work a big common action to clean the local water hole ("limpa no tanqui") this week. Our area leader requested us to ask as
many people as possible to clean up the water tank. We went around calling people, "Todos familias, vamos tirar barro no tanque por favor!!". This was the call to bring them to prepare their water tank
(they call it " tanqui" – it`s like a dry swamp) for the forthcoming rains. We gathered many people and together we repeatedly transferred buckets with heavy dirt on our heads from inside the tank to outside. We had been cleaning up there for 3 days completely just a few days later, it rained a lot 2 nights in a row!!

We got a plenty of water in the tank. What a nice timing it was! That was awesome! After the action, many people started to greet us from their sides with a more friendly voice. I felt good that the community started to accept us! We all started teaching our classes. I have an art class once a week, Jennifer has English classes in not only our project area but 2 more places, and John has some Yoga and some guitar classes. We don't have trouble to gather people, because we stand out easily form their eye sight. I found that our existences have some advantage to involve people to good activities. I think our leader really knows our specialty.

Yoko, Japan