A very productive week, satisfyingly so.
On Sunday (evidently the first day in the Portuguese week) Nuno took Simon and I to a nearby settlement, Quinta da Princesa, to help facilitate and photograph a Christmas gathering for the local community. It involved stage performances, workshops, a charity shop, a lot of excited people and other festive activities. Our tasks were primarily to help prepare the event space, and help a partner organization with the distribution of rationed supplies for disadvantaged groups, alongside just generally documenting everything. It was a long day – admittedly not as long as it must have been for the many volunteers and people directly organizing the event who were there from dawn to dusk – but it was quite the ball overall. It had been a long time since I’d been to an event like that, probably not since I was a child, and, despite not being a big Christmas fan myself, seeing how animated and responsive the people of the local area were made me feel quite excited as well. Simon and I decided to celebrate by having a pizza dinner.
After such a successful start, our work continued steadily further into the week. Most of my time at the office was devoted to researching and planning out the project that I was assigned to the previous week, which is what I’ll be mostly concerning myself with from here onwards on a daily basis. I won’t get into much detail about it yet as there’s not much of interest that I can really share at this moment, but essentially I’ve been tasked with designing an educational game which will be used to further continue the various activities that Rato conducts.
We ended the week with a general assembly, after which all of the organization’s members went to almoço together.
