Brazilian au pair Aline is spending her year in Jennifer Stein’s Texas cluster. As part of her UCLA educational requirement Aline took the opportunity to introduce her culture to 2nd grade students at the Adventist Christian Academy of Texas in Loop, Texas.
Aline taught the children about the significance of the three colors of the Brazilian flag: “Green for the woods and forests, yellow for the riches of the country, and blue for the sky and rivers”, she also “commented on the 27 stars representing the Brazilian states.”
Part of any culture is food. In Brazil a popular sweet is the Brigadeiro, made with condensed milk, chocolate powder, and butter. Aline commented, “They really loved it, they ate all [of it] while they painted Brazilian flags.”
Aline’s perceptions from her experience: “It is very good to be able to share a little of our country’s culture, children can learn about places that only come on television and we learn from them because it is lovely how open they are to learn about new cultures and people, even in the attempt to speak a different word from your language and to color a flag that is not yours so cheerfully. In a way, that motivates me, because we are just living a culture different from ours with so much media that we fail to open ourselves to the beauty of everything we have learned.”
