We visited mother and baby today. They're still not out of the hospital. It's

syphilis. They're not coming home for another week or so, as mother and daughter get treated. Little M- weighs a sack of sugar and has the wrinkled ancient face of a crack baby. But she's so beautiful...and her mother so fragile as she queries about her boyfriend and whether he's asked about her...

There was a man with a cast up to mid-thigh, a lucky escape when he was run over by a car. He muses on why the people who pass by look at them with disgust. Perhaps it had something to do with C. Vinicius, who shows off a pair of Lenny Kravitz aviators he stole off of "a gringa." A Dutch girl. They're not sure if they're good sunglasses or not. As if I would encourage them...

"Maybe that gringa was my friend..."

"Liar! She was part of a tour group!"

Bruno wants to know how much my camera cost. It was a gift; I'm not going to ask my mother.
"Well, can I ask her?"
"Sure."
He turns around..."Wait a minute! She doesn't speak Portuguese!" We both grin.

Someone wants to know why Jesus doesn't just come down and separate the Atlantic ocean at the Copacabana beach. That would be a sufficient miracle to make faith easier. "This whole "blessed are those who believe even when they can't see thing..." is really tough. It would be easier if we could see...but I know why God did that. He did it so we'd come to him out of AMOR. Out of love..."

And he also wants to know how we knew what God's will for our lives was, how we heard him speak so clearly that we left our homes to come here...

Ah, such interesting conversations that arise on the street....

Mom played tic-tac-toe with a street boy. She won. We can tease her a bit: she's been bragging and I had to remind her that she won off of a kid huffing glue. Not exactly in the most excellent of mental spirits.

Some of the kids were doing math problems. Go figure. We have a bunch of teens who have probably barely completed twelve COMBINED years of schooling, and they're excited to do math problems. Asking for harder stuff, like multiplication and division, even though North Americans draw the division lines differently than Brazilians...

I asked C. Vinicius why he was doing so good at math if he'd never gone to school and he looked at me with that tilted, gap-toothed smile:

"I know how to count money. Duh."

Ah, yes. I guess that would be a requirement for the streets. Even drug dealers don't want stupid pushers.