Vamos aprender Portugues no CIDAC

We spent four weeks in the care of CIDAC, a non-profit organization in

Portugal working on development cooperation and development education. We worked five hours per day one-on-one with our teachers: I had Manuela (with long braid and necklace) in the morning and Marisa (scarf and glasses) in the afternoon; Rich had Guida (alas, no photo!) in the morning and Manuela in the afternoon. Manuela was born and spent much of her life in Mozambique but now lives outside Lisbon.

Rich had a decent background in Portuguese from his many years of work in Mozambique, but I started from near zero - as I joked, I arrived knowing how to count to ten and as where the bathroom was! But with the patient and talented efforts of my teachers, I left with a better base for learning more in Mozambique. It's always easier to understand than to speak, so I find that I can piece together a lot of what is being said around me if I really concentrate, but I still blubber when I open my mouth. Actually, for at least the first week of classes, every time I went to open my mouth in Portuguese, Turkish came out! So I guess I still know a bit of Turkish from my time there in 1988 afterall... Not that that helps in Portugal!

We hope to be able to get back to CIDAC in the next year or so to keep working on our developing language skills, and will also work with a teacher in Mozambique in the intervening time.