Learning at the Heart

100 Posts in 100 Days

Yesterday’s post was about welcoming a new administrative assistant to our team.  All in all, I think it was a pretty good day:  tours, meeting people, lunch together, a short video for our team members not on campus, and starting to get a work area set up.

She wasn’t the only person having a first day that I was able to spend time with.  We are approaching the start of the school year and the majority of our new faculty will arrive in Sao Paulo next week.  We have a robust schedule ready for them that includes settling into their new homes and country as well as learning about our school.   But, a small number of new faculty arrive early.  So, I spent the latter part of yesterday with one of our new “early arrivers”, helping to gather some home basics and get a first dinner.  Anything to make the first day a bit easier.

When my family came, 6 years ago today (thanks Facebook, for the reminder!), we were the “early arrivers”.  And we have stories to tell.  Ones that we consider funny and a charming part of our international life.   

Shipping to Brazil is expensive and complicated.  It was easier to bring our lives with us.  Which meant studying every commercial airplane guideline and regulation.  We knew the exact size and weight of what we could check and how many we would be allowed to pay for.

 

Tips for traveling with storage bins:

• Figure out how to get them to the airport.  We had discussed renting a U-Haul van to get our bins to the airport.  About 2 days prior to departure, it occurred to me that pulling up curbside at the airport in a windowless, rented van was probably not the best idea.  Our friends and their pick-up truck came to the rescue!
• Drill holes and zip-tie them closed.  They are going to get thrown around and the lids will come off if they aren’t secure.
• Before you zip-tie them closed, on the inside lid tape a packing list of what is there and extra zip-ties.  If security agents open them, they can be re-secured. In our case, some bins were opened and checked.  They were also re-sealed with the supplies we had provided.
• Weigh them in advance and label them.  

When we arrived in Brazil in the early morning, things couldn’t have gone any smoother.  By the time we came through immigration, all of our bins had been taken off the plane and off the luggage conveyor belts.  They were already stacked all together by airport staff.  Amazing!

We loaded them on to luggage carts and tried to figure out how to get them from baggage claim to where school personnel would meet us.  With three of us traveling, we had a plan for one person to be outside of baggage claim, one person shuttling, and one person inside baggage claim as the carts were moved one-at-a-time.  One trip in and the airport staff saw what was happening.  Instantly, we had a whole team.  Airport staff rallied around and we were essentially escorted out in one trip.

Once we left baggage claim, our new school staff and colleagues were right there waiting for us.  There was no way to miss their smiling faces.  Okay, the signs and school colors may have helped.  But it’s those smiling faces that we remember.

All of our belongings were taken by our maintenance team directly to our new home.  We were taken by our HR team to school for lunch, some initial introductions, a local cell phone, and some local currency.  

Tips for schools welcoming foreign faculty:

• Greet them in person at the airport.  (It seems obvious, but I’ve heard stories where this doesn’t always happen, so add it to the arrival checklist.)
• Communicate in advance about how much baggage your new faculty will have so that you can accommodate them.  Our school knew we had all those bins…we had sent pictures in advance.  But imagine if we hadn’t.  Just as we had to plan to get our bins to the airport in the US, it was important to plan to get them from the airport in Brazil.
• Having cell phone/data options and local currency available right away are not just a benefit, but a safety net for your new faculty (read on!).

After lunch and the basics, we were taken to our new home.  We walked through the front door and all of our bins and luggage were there.  It was nice to walk in and see our things, even if they were still all packed.

We explored our apartment (which we loved!).  We took some time to rest and just soak it all in.  Unpacking started with the items from our suitcases.

Soon, we were ready for dinner.  Which became our first adventure.  We already had some grocery basics provided for us, but not ingredients for a meal.  And we had been traveling for hours, so cooking was not in our plans.  But where to go?  We weren’t quite sure.  That is where the cell phone came in helpful!  We were able to use the maps feature and search for places near to us.  So, off we went for our first neighborhood walk.  

We found a pizza place on the map.  In person, what we found was a pharmacy and a grocery store.  The grocery store was nice, but where was the pizza place?  After a bit of wandering, we realized that the pizza place was below street level.  Progress.

We entered.  There was a counter and about 2 tables.  The staff looked at us strange.  Our family just looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and forged ahead.  Which meant standing at the counter staring at a menu that we could only partially understand.  We went with the “When in Brazil…” philosophy and ordered the Portuguesa.  After navigating the language differences, we used our local currency to pay, took seats at a table, and waited for our order.

Humorous cultural lessons learned:

• Dinner hour in Brazil is NOT 5:00 pm.  We now lovingly refer to this as “gringo hour”.
• Portuguesa pizza has sausage (yum!) and egg (not so yum on pizza!)
• When there are only 2 tables in the “restaurant”, it’s probably not a sit-down location.  When there are no plates, cutlery, or other mealtime items, it’s probably not a sit-down location.  When your food is delivered in a box, it’s probably not a sit-down location.  But, we were hungry, so we sat there and ate.

We returned once again to our apartment.  Time differences and a rest had us energetic enough to start unpacking our bins.  The ones zip-tied closed.  We had scissors.  Packed in one of the bins.  So, Shauna used a knife from our pre-stocked kitchen to cut a zip tie.  

The knife slipped.  She swore.  She kept swearing.  She fought back tears.  She ran to the sink, bleeding badly.

We had a first aid kit.  Packed in one of the bins.  

It was the tip of her finger that was cut and bleeding.  We had paper towels, so she wrapped her finger.  She kept bleeding, so she changed the wrap.  She did it again.  She did it again.   

We were full of questions:  “Do we need to get to the doctor?”  “How would we get to the doctor?”  “Which bin has the first aid kit?”  “Mom, are you okay?”

“Wait!  I know what we have!” I said.  I came from the living room into the kitchen, supplies in hand.  Only to be greeted with quizzical looks and laughs from my family members.  When the first aid kit is zip-tied in some bin somewhere in the house, you use the next best thing you have to make a bandage:  maxi pads and shrink wrap from an already opened bin.  We were able to stop the bleeding.  

The pain and the fingerprinting that was required a few days later took a little longer to deal with, but looking back, it’s the kind of story that is becoming family lore.  And it reveals a few more tips.

Tips for being ready to unpack and for the first day:

• Have your scissors and first aid kit easily accessible.
• Know how to call for emergency assistance if you need it.  (We did have the phone numbers for several people at school that were available to us, along with the cell phone.)

In the end, we survived the travel and the first day.  We learned some lessons along the way.  We tell these stories every year about now when we welcome the new group of faculty.  We laugh and we appreciate that every year we get a little better at welcoming our new faculty. 

One random last tip:

• I don’t know how we thought to do this, but we brought brand new sheets for our beds with us.  We washed them before leaving the US and we were able to put them on our beds the first night.  It was a big step in making our apartment our home and I highly recommend it if you are someone moving to a new place, no matter the reason or circumstances of your move.