Brazil Day 7 - Visiting the German School

After breakfast, we set off through the crowded city to the neighborhood of Morumbi, which is one of the wealthier parts of São Paulo. The Sandfort family, our medical support for the next ten days, who had arrived during the night, also went with us. In Morumbi, we visited the 'Exzellente deutsche Auslandsschule' Porto Seguro. Porto Seguro is an expensive private school with about 5000 students. It used to be a purely German school, but during World War II, speaking German was forbidden out of fear of the National Socialism. Later, a German-Portuguese profile was introduced because the German language is considered very attractive here. Currently, this profile has about 600 students. These students alternate between the two languages ​​and master the German language, as we later found out, almost perfectly. Security is taken very seriously at the school. Surveillance cameras are everywhere and security guards can be seen on every corner.

In the auditorium of the school, we were greeted by Mrs. Barius, one of the German teachers who serves her foreign service at Porto Seguro. After a brief rehearsal and a small snack, the concert began. First, the fully crowded hall was greeted by two young students in different languages ​​in the form of a song. Then the project choir of classes 10 and 11 sang two pop songs accompanied by a small band, one of which was all too familiar to us - 'Ein Kompliment' by Sportfreunde Stiller. After we performed a few more pieces, we brought the choir onto the stage and spontaneously performed the songs 'Happy', 'We are the world', 'Rock mi' and 'Kwela Kwela' with them - everyone did very well in both singing and choreography. The audience in the hall was also fully involved. Especially the 5- to 10-year-old Brazilian children had a lot of fun dancing along. After the concert, we had the opportunity to talk to the students and make contacts.

Unfortunately, we had to leave again all too quickly because we had another concert in the Evangelical Lutheran Church 'Igreja da Paz' in the evening. The cultural attache Mr. Fuchs from the German Consulate also came to this concert, who has been working in São Paulo for 8 months. He told us a little about his life and his career, which also took him to the Adenauer Foundation and the Goethe-Institut. The concert was very well received by the audience, and since the pastor of the community comes from Kempten and could lead the program in German and Portuguese, the atmosphere was very relaxed. We spent the remaining evening individually in our hotel.