Falling Coconuts: Neighbours

I love our place here. To me it is a piece of paradise. Yes, it is a ton of work. But when we take a couple of hours off and just chill, this place is perfect. One thing I struggle with, though, is living behind a wall. Yes, our entire property is surrounded by an eight foot wall. While I recognize this is culturally expected, and probably somewhat necessary here, the country girl in me who loves wide open spaces and would rather choose to trust people is bothered by it. One of the greatest challenges of living behind walls is getting to know our neighbours. Here we cannot just chat with our neighbours as we work in our backyards.

Several of our neighbours, though, seem to hang out on the street corner outside our wall. Occasionally we try to join them. Oddly enough, we discovered that we already know one of our neighbours! Three years ago when we were here for a few months, I trained in Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art. Our neighbour is one of my fellow students from that class! It's a small world!

Anyways, we decided that we need to be intentional about getting to know our neighbours. We don't want to be perceived as standoffish rich white North Americans, plus we really are truly interested in getting to know as many people as possible in our area. So we thought about the best way to meet everyone, and came up with one answer... FOOD!

Last Saturday we hosted a giant barbecue for all our neighbours. We put the word out to a few people and told them to invite neighbours as well as all the people who have worked here on our renovation project. (Most of them also live within a few minutes of our place.) And word spread! About 40 people showed up for an afternoon of relaxing, visiting, eating, swimming, eating, playing soccer and eating. It was a great time! While I still don't know most of my neighbour's names, I have at least seen many of their faces, and they have seen mine. We hope they know they can come by to chat or hang out, and we hope that these relationships can continue to grow as we become more settled in this little community of Jardim Icaraí.