come undone.

Bye bye Brasil

A 10 hour plane, 3 hour car ride, 70F temperature difference later, we were back in our humble abode of urbana-champaign. Brasil remains a memory, to be revisited soon. Salvador was amazing but there's still Rio and Sao Paolo and the whole of South America to explore. Anticipation leads the charge; nothing to miss, everything to look foward to ...

Semester 2!

It's as if we were heli-dropped back into our college lives; within hours we were all back in our classes. This semester's kind of brutal, classes are much tougher than the previous semester. Everything to thank God for last semester tho: good results, good vacation, good health, good everything.

- Weekly small group to begin next week onwards. That's a resolution that's shaping up good.

- Trying to find someway to impact people around me. Was kind of motivated by what rose mentioned in the email.

- Filling my surroundings with verses

- May guidance lead the path ahead this semester!

Happy 2008!

(not so happy yesteday because it was -15 degrees. Not even funny)

Salvador 101

Brazil from the air

Barra Praia

+++++

all saints bay

New Years Eve

The story

It was the golden ages of the 1500s, a flourishing triangular trade, gold-hungry minds, the white man and his greed. Coffee and Cotton, Spices and Slaves.

Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, the first location the Portuguese landed at - all saints Bay. Beautiful, abundant, enchanting. "This is our land," they claimed. And then it begin, a trecherous, inhumane period of almost 300 years of slavery. The fields, the port, the houses... the African slaves had their identities crushed and their whole self destroyed, creating not another class in society, but merely a living entity with absolutely no minds of their own.

But although they came empty, naked, desolate, the slaves brought with them their culture, which helped mould and shape the beauty of Salvador today. Capoeira, Candomble, the acarache, just to name a few of the elements that reveals the survival of the slave; not a win over their master, but a peices of Africa which they managed to preserve and sustain despite the onslaught of the White Man.