One of the things I have been asked to bring to Brasil is some of the discipline of time-keeping that we Scandinavians have a reputation of being masters at. Eager to start an organisational revolution at the AMA Institute, I asked its director and my host, Aurimar, if they had a list of students so that we could allocate weekly individual lesson times. I had great difficulty trying to explain what a schedule is, and when I mentioned timetable he thought I needed some kind of desk. All is well now, though – this week the pupils received their first ever individual violin lesssons, and I could sense a slight nervosity in some of them for being the centre of attention for a whole half hour. However, they are very keen and fast learners, even though my Portuguese is very poor. Our communication consists mostly of body language and a few badly pronounced sentences, and they patiently correct my grammar. More often than not my students believe I understand more than I do, and start chattering away without realizing I lost it at the second word. Thankfully music is something that can be taught and learnt without much vocabulary at all!
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