Change

It's been a while since my last post and my promise to change is bearing fruit. In the past 3 months I have done a lot of soul searching, talking to friends, colleagues and family. A friend who just finished a coaching course and offered me some career coaching sessions. The main focus of the sessions were career progression and professional development as I felt stuck at where I was with my career.
Honestly, when we started the sessions, I didn't expect much out of them but now, 6 months later, a lot of things have happened. I have opened myself for change and I got a lot more than I ever expected and it's all very exciting.
A few weeks ago, I turned down a position that I was offered within my department. It would have been a great opportunity for me to learn a lot but it just didn't feel right to me, it wasn't something that I would have wanted to do long term. One evening, while I was driving home after conducting an interview with a possible candidate for one of our open positions, a thought crossed my mind that made me smile. Why am I not trying to develop myself further in human resources? All of a sudden, this felt the right way to go and it gave me a lot of energy and zest to make it happen. I had conversations with the relevant people in my company to get what I want and they were open to discuss it and see what they can do for me, which made me very happy.
In the meantime, my life is taking an unexpected turn with a lot more change than I had expected, but that will be another post whenever I am ready to share the news!

The moral of this post is that if you want change, open yourself up, talk about it and welcome it. Change is great and makes life more interesting!

Cultural Exchange

Part of the Cross Cultural Solutions program is cultural exchange, we bring our knowledge and skills to the local community and at the same time learn about the culture in our host country.

The mornings are spent at our volunteer placements and in the afternoon CCS offers cultural programs. We have Portuguese lessons twice per week with Tatiana, a local language teacher.

On Monday evenings, we have Capoeira and Samba classes with Beto, one of the local guys working at the house. He is part of the Capoeira group ‘Ginga Mundo’ in Salvador. Capoeira is a combination of martial arts, sports and music and was initially created by descendants of African slaves around the 16^th century.

Beto gave us all a Capoeira name and taught us some of the basic steps and movements of Capoeira. Ginga is the basic step of Capoeira. While teaching us some Samba, he kept saying ‘mushy mushy bum bum’, that’s his way of saying shake your booty.

 Every Tuesday afternoon, Bruno, a local with blue eyes which is very rare in this part of Brazil, takes us around parts of the city. Our first city tour was through Pelourinho, Salvador’s famous old town built by the Portuguese which is now an UNESCO world heritage site. Although Pelourinho is very touristy it is a wonderful place to visit. The cobble stone streets are lined with colorful houses that have been restored and now house restaurants, small hotels, shops, theatres and museums. We also visited the Pierre Verger exhibition; he was a photographer who spent a lot of time documenting Candomblé ceremonies in the 1950’s. Pelourinho is great on Tuesday evenings as there are small bands playing everywhere in the neighborhood. 

This week Bruno took us through São Cateano, one of Salvador’s favela. We also stopped at a tile artist’s house in the Ribeiro neighborhood; his name is Prentice and all of his tiles are hand-painted and depict Bahian life. After a short stop at the oldest ice cream shop where we tried peanut ice cream we visited the Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, which is the most famous church in Salvador and is famous for its power to effect miraculous healing cures. There is a shrine inside the church with all sorts of plastic body parts such as arms, legs and heads, put there by people who got cured of their ailments. Thousands of colorful Bonfim wish ribbons are tied to the iron fence outside the church.

Professor Fred comes one afternoon per week and teaches us Brazilian history. He is a wonderful character born to a Lebanese father and Negro Brazilian mother (in Brazil, black people are called Negroes and it is not an insult). He traveled around the world for 10 years without any money when he was in his 20’s and he had some interesting stories to share with us.