Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Brazil: Curritiba
Curritiba Curritiba was never on my original itinerary for workshops in Brazil, but when Areta and I met at a national meeting in Brasília, plans rearranged themselves almost instantly. She invited me to her institute in Curritiba—she was the director—and of course I said yes. I no longer remember the exact workshop topic; it must have been something connected to language teaching or what we then called “learning differences,” long before the vocabulary settled into today’s understanding of neurodiversity. What I do remember are the people, and I remember the town. The City My time in Curritiba was lovely. It was winter back home, but in Brazil it was a balmy summer. Ipês, jacarandás, and bougainvillea spilled color everywhere, and the air carried that soft, humid perfume that makes life feel unhurried. The whole city seemed wrapped in green—parks, tree-lined streets, gardens that looked tended by people who loved beauty as much as practicality. And the people matched the...