My name is Zalira Silveira and I am a Portuguese translator volunteer to this magazine. I'm 48 years old and have 4 kids. Patricia, 27 years old, Rachel 24 years old, Raphael 21 years old and Daniel just 17 years old. My husband's name is Ari and he's 51 years old.

I am a Social Worker and always loved to work with the most special people to my heart : people with disabilities. As a teenager, at the age of fourteen I was already a volunteer at a Handicapped Children's Hospital in Brazil. I worked many years as a Case Social Worker at a Rehabilitation Center,dealing with kids with cerebral palsy and elderly people.

But I always wanted to learn the Sign Language. I wanted to talk to the deaf people and to record book tapes to the blind ones.

I feel so happy when I can help! And every time I receive a story from the Deaf Friends Magazine to translate I start imagining your exciting happy faces and bright smiles reading the other people life' stories that each of us, volunteer translators make to this magazine.

So, remember always that I have you all in my mind and heart every time I translate!

Zalira Silveira
Portuguese/Brazilian translator

I was born in Brazil, the biggest country in South America and the fourth in the world. It's territory is 8.511.996 km2 and population of 232 million people. The Capital of Brazil is Brasilia. And we are the only country in South America that speak Portuguese! All the other ones around us speak Spanish.

Sao Paulo is the fourth biggest city in the world after New York, Tokyo and Mexico City . There are now 17 million people, just in the city!

Probably you heard about Brazil before, because of the growing destruction of the "Amazon Forest" , "Rain Forest" and also called "The Green Lungs of the Planet". There we also have the biggest water volume river of the world: The Amazon River. The people use to say that The Amazon is not a river but a sea because you can't see its other side on the horizon so wide it is . The Nile river in Egypt is the longest one. And the famous Anaconda giant snake (sometimes longer than 10 meters) lives there too! How fascinating is the flora and fauna!