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

Kathleen @ DLL in Porto Alegre

Five days after we arrived in this beautiful country, I would like to share some of my impressions. The travelscedule the friendly people of Rotary Canoas Industrial prepared for us untill now is full of interesting meetings at governmental departments, presentations at commercial enterprices and research institutions, local development projects and ofcourse there is time to experience the cuisine of Rio Grand do Sul. Untill now, in one word tri legal!
As a human resource advisor @ Rabobank I was invited to visit the HR department of De Lage Landen in Porto Alegre. A great opportunity for me to meet HR professionals in Brazil and to interchange knowledge on different HR topics like the collective labour agreement, employee recruitment, trainig and development, compensation and benefit schemes. Many thanks to Francisca, Kátia, Daniela of HR and Maarten Viskaal, the president director of DLL for their time and answering all my questions during the whole day!
I included some pictures of today.

Day 1

After the relaxing first day, we all ended up with the message that the real programme was about to start on Monday. This day was organised by one of the Rotary clubs of Porto Alegre.

Our host families would bring us to Jairo´s place at 8:00. We were brought to one of the Rotarians of Porto Alegre. After the formalities and several pictures, we were on our way to the first meeting of our busy programme.
The Secretary of Policy Coordination and Local Governance of Porto Alegre, Clênia Maranhão invited us in the Town Hall. Together with an interpreter, she talked about the difficulties of governing a huge city such as Porto Alegre, with its 1.5 million inhabitants. The emphasis of her term was on decentralisation by opening local governmental offices to understand the local problems. More info on http://www2.portoalegre.rs.gov.br/cs/default.php?reg=105504&p_secao=3&di=2009-04-06

Secondly we took a stroll around the local market. The accompanying Rotarians showed us the several places. As Porto Alegre is located next to Brazil´s biggest lake, we naturally had to lunch at a tasty fish restaurant. The amount of caipirinhas consumed was quite alright, especially by one of hosts.
Happily after, we made a short visit of the new mall. Because of the nice weather, the indoor location of the shops seems quite strange. For safety reasons, the Brazilians prefer these over outdoor shops.

Next on the programme was the visit to SEDAI, the State Department of Development and International Affairs. The sympathic secretary explained the goals of the organisation and asked us about our background. He gave us a nice impression of the developments of the region to attract more investors.

Two more things were yet to come: the visit to the president of the assemblee and a meeting with the local press. We were kinldy received by the president. With the help of an interpreter he tried to address our vocational questions. The head of the newspaper Correio do Povo old us their story as an independent newspaper in a very political country and made some pictures from us for Tuesday´s news paper.

Thanks to the guidance of the Rotarians were were received with open arms every where. After saying goodbye to them, we went back to Canaos for our first BBQ at Jairo´s place, together with all our host families. After a long day of nice impressions, the daily greetings to our families was as the amount and size of BBQ meat: impressive and welcome.

Wouter

Some pictures

The Plane











At Schiphol .......



Jo-Anne had to repack !










At the barbecue lunch

First impressions

After weeks of preparation, yesterday it began! Early in the morning, we met at Schiphol Airport and left our country for the trip!
Almost 20 hours later we arrived at Porto Alegre. There was a big delegation of the Rotary Clubs and our guest families.

My first impressions:

- nice, friendly people
- lovely temperature, only bad weather (rain)
- a lot of meat at barbecue
- capairinha´s
- the Portuguese Brazilian language is difficult, but I´m trying

Tomorrow we have our first formel meeting, but what we are going to do is not clear to me. It will be a surprise.

Jo-Anne