Purpose

The main purpose for this blog is to keep me sane while I move with my family to the Amazonian city Rio Brano. Now, Rio Branco isn't quite what one might envision when thinking of an "Amazon city". You might picture jungle thickets, grass huts, and naked indigenous people digging for tubers. Not exactly! Rio Branco is a bustling city of almost 300 thousand boarding Bolivia and the Peruvian Andes. The trick for me is to figure out how to acclimate myself, our 2& 1/2-year-old and 4 month old daughters to a foreign country. I feel a bit anxious, not knowing which vaccines to get them, how old the children need to be to receive the needed shots, and what will the water be like? Potable? I'm sure they will have bottled water at a fair price…hopefully! Today the real (pronounced ree-al) exchange rate is 2.28 to 1 US dollar... Not bad, we should be able live comfortably on the grant money and the various other contributions we have secured. Six more weeks here in Charlottesville, Virginia, then four weeks in California before jetting off to Sao Paulo where we will stay for couple of days before flying into the upper north-west region of the Amazon.