We got the second blizzard of the winter at MIT on Wednesday getting a good 16+ inches of snow, while the D-Lab team in Brazil got poured on by the rain. Good news is that the D-Lab Brazil team has made it to Sao Paulo, from where we get the news via Amit Ghandi, a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and also trip leader for the D-Lab Brazil team:
Our time in Brazil has been an amazing experience so far, but also quite hectic. Immediately after leaving the airport, we met the team from the University of Sao Paulo (USP), and headed over to Santo Antonio, the community we are working with. We had dinner and met with our community partners (and celebrated a little bit with impromptu Samba lessons too) and proceeded to spend the night there. Our follow day was spent walking through the community to visit two sites we will be focusing our projects on, Ze Mineiro and Morumbi 2. After a day of hard work researching the sites and getting drenched in the rain (as you can see from our picture!), we drove back to Sao Paulo to spend the night at the homes of our partner USP students. We'll be spending the next week and a half working in Santo Antonio, spending the nights in Sao Paulo. We will try to update you all a couple of times a week, but we want to leave you with the thought that we are working hard and thoroughly enjoying ourselves.