Impressions of the first week

Our first week in Brazil was great; a good mix of visits to interesting companies, social projects sponsored by Rotary and a lot of fun with our host families. Every evening we met up at one of the host families, where they prepared a great meal, typically from this region. The nights usually ended with us dancing and singing all together. Photo: our team leader enjoying the bbq with Jairo and his girl friend.

The program of this week was taken care of by Rotary clubs in the cities Cachoerinha, Canoas and Gravatai. Three quite large cities surrounding Porto Alegre. In Cachoerinha (which means little waterfall) we visited an agricultural school on land the size of 42 ha. The director of the school told as a lot about there way of teaching, translated by a member of the Rotaract club. The children learn how to conserve nature while working on agricultural projects. The tour on their school property showed us how they cultivate rice . We visited IRGA a research institute on rice production. 60 % of the rice production in Brazil takes place in this state, Rio Grande do Sul.

In the center of Cachoerinha we visted the local chamber of commerce, 400 commercial organizations are listed. The chamber assists them on marketing and sales. At the Rotary club we presented ourselves briefly, after a really nice lunch. The next activity on the program was bringing a visit to the enterprise Renova, a large cleaning company for industrial towels, covers for airplane chairs, etc. The chief commercial officer guided us and answered our questions about the production proces, clients and how they handle chemical waste. Their sustainable production proces takes care of dealing with waste to minimize harming the environment. Our day ended by visiting a private university, build up from a small kindergarten. A few teachers guided us through their new building. In Brazil it is common to work during the day and study in the evening, this told us a lot about how ambitious young Brazilians are!

The next day our host club Canoas Industrial took care of our program. In the morning we visited three social projects of Rotary. A shelter for teenage mothers, a project that provides the basics needs for poor people in one of the poor neighboorhoods and the local hospital. The ambulance is sponsored by this Rotary club. At lunch time we were received at the Rotary meeting, where we told the members about the Netherlands. To our surprise they even arranged to play our national anthem. After lunch we visited the huge refinary of PetroBras, the largest oil company of Brazil. The completely automated system to control the gas production proces was really impressive.

The local news paper of Canoas was our next stop. Together with the president of the Rotary club they interviewed us about our impressions of Rio Grande do Sul and the GSE goals. The next we were famous in Canoas :-)

To be continued...

Emma