Bread For Those Who Hunger

The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.

That's Portuguese for me. I do fine..I can get by...but far from fluent right now. And as I sit in my lessons and realize all the words and all the conjucations yet to learn, well, I better get CRACKIN'!

THAT AGNOSTIC TAUGHT ME A THING OR TWO ABOUT CHRIST--MAS

So again I kind of got some insights from my Portuguese Teacher. At the end of today's class, she was giving me some slang that people use, and one of them was Step-by-Step. I countered with the question, how do you say Line Upon Line...it's very common in the English vocabulary.

She'd never heard it. I said it was in the Bible. She's never read it. I said, WHAT, this is such a Catholic Country, how could you not have read even some part of it? She said her parents were Agnostic and so is she. In disbelief I said but you must have heard some lines from the Bible--especially during Christmas.

No, she's never read any part of the Bible. EVEN about Christmas--I couldn't let that go. Jokingly I said, well you're a SINNER then.

And then she enlightened me a bit.

She said she didn't know sin as most people do. She said that to her, seeing all the people go hungry, is the real sin. That we as a civilized society will allow the sin of hunger to still exist on the earth.

And then she said that Christmas is a very sad time for her. She sees all the happy faces, the merry making, the frivelous gifts being given to one another...and all these people are walking past the starving child on the street to get to their next party. THAT, she said, is a TRUE SIN if there is such a thing as SIN.

I'm not so sure Christ would disagree with this person that professes she doesn't believe in him.

As I left, she said that when her Father sat his family of seven children down for dinner, these are the words he offered before eating (in my humble translation from Portuguese to English):

"Give bread for those who hunger, and give charity to those that have bread."

It's a good thought. One to live one's life by.

THAT BRASIL-ILOGCAL CLOCK IS TICKING

I had a sinking feeling today. My original ticket was to leave Rio this Friday. 2 1/2 months have almost come and gone.

Even so, I'll be returning the first part of January. I'm not gonna get all melancoly about about it now, but I really am going to miss so many things about living here.

So many...

BACK TO SEEING THE SIGHTS

If the weather holds up...I'm gonna take in a couple of museums, maybe the Christ Statue, and some palaces tomorrow. One never knows. :) But I'm gonna make a day of it.

So pack the sunscreen and maps...I'm off.

BTW, tomorrow I try my second batch of beans...maybe even tonight. We'll see how this one goes...hopefully without burning--although I finished of the pot i made a couple of days ago yesteday and actually they weren't half bad.

Even tasty, if I MUST (and I MUST) say so myself.

I called them CAJUN BEANS...Mom, you should have done that.

Hey everybody, Mom's Making Cajun Toast again...and she LOVES eating it.