Living in a Sauna

I feel like I'm drowning! Why do I feel like I can't get anything done?! Why am I so tired?! Many days I find that I am more than ready to go to bed by 8:00 at night. This was a great mystery until I started to take into account the heat here. Most mornings it's already over 90 degrees and by mid-afternoon it's approaching 100. Unfortunately, since electricity is quite expensive, most Brazilian houses only have one window air conditioner in their whole house. Actually, I don't know of a single house in Brazil that has central air. We try to run our air conditioner as little as possible since every hour really adds up on our electric bill at the end of the month. Some days it really does feel like we're living in a sauna.

I found online that NASA did a study on the effects of heat on productivity. This is what they found:

Effective Temp.	75	80	85	90	95	100	105
Loss in Output	3%	8%	18%	29%	45%	62%	79%

http://truefog.com/Heat%20Stress/Heat%20Stress.htm

No wonder I feel like I'm not getting as much done as I would expect. Add to this that cooking takes longer here because we have to make things from scratch. Then since we don't have a dishwasher or could afford the electricity to run it, we wash all the dishes by hand. A good hour or two of my day is sucked up by washing dishes! Then since it's so hot, we go through more clothes, and since we don't use a clothes dryer, each piece is hung on the line to dry.

Then there's the cleaning. My house gets so much dirtier than in the States. Seriously, where does all this dirt come from! It's a fine dust, so we end up needing to mop just about everyday. I feel like I clean all the time and my house looks dirtier after one day than if I hadn't cleaned for a month in the States. Although I must say, there is something rewarding about seeing a definite change when you dust or mop something.

Here is my mop rag after mopping just the dining room. This is after I mopped it the day before and already swept it right before moping it.

Now you can imagine how nice it was to have Anna, a friend from Michigan, come down to Brazil for three weeks in October to help us. I met Anna "by chance" at a store in Michigan in June. She happened to hear that we live in Brazil and since she was interested in missions, she asked if we ever had internships. I said that we sometimes do, but our biggest need was to have someone help with watching the kids, and I added that I was sure she probably wasn't too interested in that. Turns out, she loves kids and is the oldest of nine children! About a week later she was buying her ticket to come down to Brazil!

Anna in Brazil

Anna was such a huge help to us. She watched the kids, helped keep the house clean, helped with meals, and washed dishes. This allowed me to finally spend a good amount of focused time working on the language. Mike and I were able to write a rough draft of a linguistic paper that really helped us understand the "Curto" language better.

It was hard to see her go, but she's planning to come back in February to help us for nearly four months! What a blessing!

If anyone else would like to come down for an extended period to watch kids and help with household tasks -- let me know!

~Kelli