Those who can, ...come back tomorrow

I finally got my merda together to try and get some teaching work, which has turned out to be a very... Brazilian experience. The school asked me to come in for an informal interview last Friday, at which they told me they didn’t have any work for me. They then phoned half an hour later and said they had a class for me at a school out in the suburbs, and could I start on Monday. I sat up preparing my lesson for most of Sunday night, trying desperately to eke out activities to fill the 75 minutes, and turned up bright and early and gibbering slightly with fear for my class on Monday.

On arrival at the school, friendly greetings immediately became blank looks when I said I was here for my lesson, and it turned out there was no such class on Mondays. I was breezily told to come back the next day. Maybe. They would phone me in the morning to confirm. I waited to graciously wave away the apology for their lack of organisation, and after a short silence, began the quarter-mile trudge back to the bus stop for my 40-minute journey home in 40-degree heat. The sanguine, philosophical nature of my reflections on the differences between Brazilian and English attitudes to needlessly wasting several hours of people’s goddamn time can probably be imagined.

However, they did manage to confirm, and I had my first lesson yesterday. The residual effect of phoning students on the morning of the lesson to tell them about it was that ten minutes after it was due to start, a total of three students had turned up. I tried not to panic too obviously about the fact that most of my getting-to-know-you activities involved team games, but the relief probably showed on my face when, just as my non-team activities finished, a fourth student arrived, and my bacon was saved.

Well, to an extent. There’s a slight going-through-the-motions forlornness about four children sitting close together in the middle of a large, echoing classroom, competing gamely despite the fact that one team are winning everything because their teacher doesn’t know them well enough to pair the dumb kids with the clever ones.

*tumbleweed*

Still! There are always reasons to be cheerful. After all, one of the boys is called Alison.
Also, on Saturday morning Meire is taking me, Aline and her sisters Alicea and Janaina on a road-trip down to Salvador for carnival. WOO-HA! I’m so looking forward to it that not even ‘Lisie and Ina slagging off axê and pagode, the Bahian music I love, is putting me off in the least.
I merely smile at the thought that the best Recife can offer is frevo, which involves a dance that looks like a chronically pigeon-toed person attempting the can-can and the hokey-cokey at the same time, while brandishing a miniature rainbow-coloured umbrella. Frevo is quite often danced by large, muscular men.

Brazilians are notorious for throwing themselves into any kind of dance, however naff, with endearing whole-heartedness. However, a less widely-known side effect of this is that when, as in the case of frevo, they embrace the ridiculous over the sublime, they are quite capable of making Timmy Mallett look like James Dean.