Swine Flu in Caldas?
Last Sunday Jovana began to get a little cough. Eliene took her and Heloisa to Church that night and Jovana returned with a worse cough. Events transpired until Jose Carlos had cold/flu symptoms by Tuesday. By that time Jovana was better. Then on Thursday Heloisa began coughing and sneezing and on Friday Jovana vomited a bit and had a headache. Jose Carlos, who had recuperated, came home from school after vomiting a bit. To top it off, Eliene got a doozie of a cold/flu, alternately coughing and sneezing. Her symptoms lasted pretty severely until this morning, when she got well. And Heloisa... she began with a cough this afternoon. Well, our family's travails are but a microcosm. A one year child reportedly died of flu complications. The kids' school decided to close for 10 days (there are two holidays in between) to give the students a chance to recover at home out of the contagion field of other kids. Me? I've been popping Vitamin C and Echinacea for some time and I've been eating 3-4 oranges a day. The combination seems to have helped bolster my resistance. Let's see.
Jose Carlos' Education Saga
Jose Carlos spent the first two years of school in Goiania when he lived with his grandmother. Those years were wasted. Worse, they served to reinforce a sense of failure and distaste for school. He has improved markedly, but he still lacks the basic building blocks gained in the first and second grades... he does not grasp as easily as he could if he but were better grounded. The school's owner Fatima Miyuni suggested that he double up his sessions, doing second grade in the morning and his fifth grade in the afternoon. All agree that next year will be even more challenging than this one has been.
Les and Me
My friend Les Foulds, a retired New Zealand University professor, and I have formed a literary club, the Marmitexati. We're like two little boys, but we lack a clubhouse. Why the name Marmitexati? It's to celebrate Les' gaffe that he made to his wife's son-in-law. While riding in their lunch box (marmitex) delivery van, he noticed a chain link divider between the two seats and the cargo compartment. When the son-in-law said it was for marmitex, Les thought it was a breed of dog - the barrier was erected to keep dogs from entering the front seat. Was he ever embarrassed to find that marmitex is a delivered box lunch that working people often get at work. We will read Paolo Coelho (widely translated into English) and several other Brazilian authors. The activity will complement our Sunday outings which terminate in a good TV session of Rumpole and The Bailey, Black Adder or Faulty Towers Brit comedy/drama re-runs on DVD. A bit of Anglo culture has arrived in Caldas Novas.
That's all the news from Caldas Novas, where all of the men (except Les and me) are macho, all of the children (especially ours) are precocious and all of the women are feminine only as Brazilians can be.
