Family!

Since Friday, it's been a wonderful time of family reunions.  Matt was  here as were Tim and Von, for a couple of days in addition to all the cousins and siblings who made it here for a day.

The icing on the cake has been the serendipitous discovery and reconnection with my cousins in Brazil!  My father's brother Luis emigrated from Cuba to Brazil in the 1950's.  I met one cousin briefly in the mid 70's, and after my father died in 2002, I had email contact with Luis until his death a couple of years later.  And since then, we've lost contact.   This is where Facebook comes in.  A cousin in Miami made a FB friend request to me which I accepted.  She was in FB contact with our aunt in Brazil, and the rest is history.  I have "met" my aunt, reconnected with the cousin I met briefly, and have become friends with him and his daughter.  I've also "met" my other cousin, and two of his sons.  So now I have a whole network of family that I've never known.  We are sharing family photos and stories.  There is a language barrier; most of them speak Portuguese, which I do not.   However, several of them are fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, which are similar enough that we can make ourselves understood.  My Spanish is barely adequate, but at least one cousin is fluent in English too. So between our shared language capabilities, the wonder of Google translate, and my word root knowledge, we are making ourselves understood.

It's also what would have been my father's 91st birthday today, so all of us are digging into our files to find pictures of him.  My sisters have some old photos (from his childhood in Cuba) that I've never seen before, so that's been fun.  And my Brazilian family are sharing their pictures and it's easy to see that we are all from a common gene pool!

So, despite all the issues with privacy on FB, right now I'm loving it!