06/06/10

This morning the 12 girls from the orphanage who got baptized on Easter Sunday received their first communion. Unlike Easter which a huge production, today’s celebration was fairly low-key, but still fun and beautiful. After mass Irmã Ana asked me to talk to a youth group she has for adolescents called “Friends of Maín,” a group in which adolescents talk about their lives and how they can model their own lives after the one of their patron saint. She didn’t give me much direction, just talk to them about the same life issues that I talk about with my REDES group. I tried asking the group of 11 kids what the group meant to them, why they thought it was important and meaningful in their lives, whether they thought that emulating the life of a teenager in the 1800s in Italy was achievable here and now in Mozambique, etc, but they weren’t really having it. So I told them a little about myself, my background, age (they don’t realize how special they are, I don’t tell anyone here my age), and a little about my life and asked if they wanted to ask me questions. Finally the floodgates opened, they wanted to know all about my parents, how many siblings I had, did I want to become a nun, what was my last name, why wasn’t I staying in Mozambique after my two years were up, was I married, did groups like their exists in the States, did I want to have children?
Similar to in Spanish, in Portuguese when you want to refer to a little version of something, you add “-ino” to the end of the word. For example, at school everyone jokingly refers to the first class of eight graders (since classes are arranged by age) as the “pequeninos” (pequeno is small in Portuguese). The word for pants in Portuguese is “calças” so one might logically assume that the “calcinhas” were shorts, but actually this means underwear, while the word for shorts is “calções.” So while everyone understood what she really meant, they still found it pretty amusing the other day when Ann walked into the tailor’s at the mission (where all clothes are ironed and folded after being washed, so about 5 people were working) and announced that she would like him to make underwear for her.