Friday, February 18, 2006

Bishop Robson, his fifteen year old son, and two other adults were our only participants in Palhoça this evening. Palhoça is a city 20 or so km from São José, and when we first began asking local leaders which area needed us to visit the most, they kept telling us to go to Palhoça; so it was one of the first cities we scheduled with when we first arrived.

To the bishop’s disappointment, and ours almost nobody came; but that didn’t mean the course was a bust. In fact, the small number of participants meant we could focus on each of them individually and we could get through the course a bit faster.

Gleici and Richard are the two other participants; Gleici is a student studying to be a physiotherapist, while Richard (her boyfriend) is a musician who just moved to the area a few weeks ago. It was a great group, and they participated well.

The rest of the day was spent trying to study or watching the winter Olympics. We also worked a bit at the SRE center and made a few phone calls about job vacancies in the area, and sent emails to the bishops of the Florianópolis and São José stakes with this information.

Oh, so I emailed one of the local professional soccer teams, Avaí, and offered to take photos for their website. I got a reply email asking me to call them, and yesterday during our conversation they invited me to take pictures of a game on the 1st of March, and they also want me to take general pictures of the stadium and things like that. No, they’re not going to pay me, but they will provide transportation (which I negotiated for) and so at least I won’t be paying anything, and it should be a great experience.