Last week was still hot but the temperature was down in the 90's with the heat index around 95-100. It was still hot but, honestly, it felt more like our regular summers.
Two weeks ago, if you remember, the temperature was around 102 with the heat index between 115-120. Not a regular summer at all.
I grew up in Tennessee and thought I understood about humidity. In reality I knew nothing about it until we moved here. It was terrible here two weeks ago. I honestly have never experienced heat like that before in my life. No relief either unless you found a pool to stay in, drove over an hour away to get to a beach or just lived under a cold shower.
The girls got back form São Paulo state on last week (thank you for your prayers for their safety and the test that they took) and they just melted when they got off the plane here. They talked about how much cooler it was there than here.
But it isn't just us here in the deep southern part of Brasil who are experiencing this heat wave. Rio is getting it worse than us. Go here to read more about it . This is an article about their heat wave last week.
Read it and you'll get an idea of what it's been like here. All of this is being blamed on El Nino.
The things they describe in the article are the things that we were feeling two weeks ago except we were about 10 degrees cooler than where they were. Their high last Tuesday was 115 degrees with the humidity making it feel much hotter. The article said only one place in all the world was hotter than Rio last Tuesday.
Their heat put our heat in perspective. I can't believe they were that much hotter than our worst days here. It must have been miserable for anyone there.
There is a lot of poverty in Rio. Benay and I were talking about how the poor there would have tried to cool off with no air conditioning, no breeze, etc. I can't describe how bad 90+ degrees in your house feels. We at least have an air conditioner that we can turn on in a room and get some relief. Those people in the favelas there have nothing to combat the heat.
A favela (or for lack of a better term, slum) there might look like this......
....or this.....
......and be spread out like this. They are, literally, their own cities.
There is much poverty in Rio. There is also great wealth there. This extreme poverty and great wealth live side by side in many ways. It's like many big cities in Brasil.
We have a friend that lives here but is from Rio. All of his family still live there. His son just got back from a visit to Rio and he said our heat was nothing compared to Rio. I can't imagine the suffering going on in that city.
Please pray for those who live in Rio. Especially the elderly. We've finally broken out of our El Nino heat wave here and we are praying for it to break in Rio soon. We are actually experiencing some rainy days and temps in the 70's. Hallelujah!
We've been getting emails from people in the states saying they will send us some cold if we send them some heat. A few days ago we got an email from our brother-in-law (who lives on the outskirts of D.C.) and he said they got about 35 inches of snow in 5-6 days.
I can honestly tell you that for people in our city and Rio, we would make that trade in a second.
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