Back in Brazil

Now that I am back in Brazil, I spent several more days at FIEP and learned about several other initiatives the NGO has including:

Small Business Consulting and Funding

FIEP offers consulting services for small and micro businesses at little or no cost to the businesses. This is possible through funding by the inter-american development bank. This is a really great service to small businesses that cannot afford consulting normally to help them to stay competitive in an ever more globalized market.


Cancer Screening

As Leticía shared with me, FIEP has a mobile cancer screening program. The program runs out of a truck with three screening rooms. The truck travels throughout the state, coordinating with companies to have employees screened, performing almost 10,000 screens last year.  

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Outside of my job shadowing things have been going well in general. My family here is great! They are very open and patient with me when I do not understand. The other day they told me they were really enjoying my company and having me there on exchange which was really sweet.

Me with my family with my host father's family using our homemade selfie pole made with a window cleaning tool

My language skills are coming along. I am pretty good at understanding what people say to me and can generally get across the idea of what I would like to say. I went to the market to get some souvenirs and one of the women there said my Portuguese was really really good for only having been here for two months. It made me feel really great and that my hard work is apparent!

The one part of the exchange that is a little difficult is not really having friends. I have quite a bit of free time but few friends to spend that time with. Since I spend the majority of my time with my family, Rotarians, and job shadowing, I don't spend much time with people my age in order to make good friends with them. Additionally the people  have made friends with are pretty busy working or studying during the time I am free. I do have a good friend from my exchange in Chile (who is Brazilian) that studies here so I have gotten to hang out with him again for the first time in about five years which is really nice.

Although it is hard not spending much time with people my age, since I am used to doing almost exclusively this at university where I lived, studied, worked and competed with other university students, I think it is good to learn to spend more time with people of other generations which I will be doing in my work when I return.