Photos of my tropical campus

This latest virtual exhibition comes from my wanderings around the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais campus. I wish I could take an aerial shot of the campus for you. Altogether it is stunningly beautiful. It's located on a hill on the southwest side of town, and sorta overlooks the city from its highest point. But location aside, the undulating hills and the random corners of unpredictably laid buildings are a treat to the eye every time i walk onto campus. Here are just a few of the images I've tried to capture and make my own - at least as much as I possibly can.

Belo Horizonte in the background, taken from the main library parking lot at the top of campus

Main entrance to main courtyard

Cross, side of building, main courtyard

One of the many winding paths that criss-cross campus, lined with benches that students use to either study or make out on

PUC-Minas logo, side of the main library

The main library of one of the country's top universities sits in the shadow of a favela, one of Brazil's many poor neighborhoods recognized around the world for their buildings of multiple colors mounted one on top of another, almost always on a hillside

Commons area for the History and Geography departments

Students playing futesol, a smaller game of futebol, at the campus sporting complex

Worker, main courtyard


Pile of wood - just like UI, PUC-Minas is undergoing interminable construction

Koi Pond, main courtyard

Campus main entrance

Brazilian Bus Photography

The following is a series of photos either of buses here in Belo Horizonte, of scenes on the buses themselves, or of scenes that I took of people on the street while riding on the bus. My method was sort of spy-camera-esque, sneaking shots when no one was expecting them. Buses are a huge part of the culture in BH. There are several different categories of routes, with dozens of buses running each route. There are buses that cross the entire city from one outlying neighborhood to another. There are those that only operate within the center of the city. There are routes that travel from neighboring small towns to the center of the city and back again. Finally there are those that go from one neighboring town to the next. I'm sure there are more, I just haven't discovered them. There must be thousands of people that use the bus everyday here. I don't know any exact statistics (once I find out where to find good statistics on anything I'll make sure I put them here for your enlightenment), but bus-riders are everywhere you look. It's definitely a significant part of the culture. Trips can take up to an hour for many, making a total daily commute of around two hours depending on where someone lives and works. Some routes can be as full as interdorm cambuses at UI (or worse) for up to half the route, 20-30 minutes or so. As an American you really have to shrink your personal bubble (and hold on for dear life!). Anyways, I hope you enjoy this little exhibition of some of my latest work.


Incoming bus to the Estação Barreiro in Barreiro, dusk


Guy listening to music on the 4111 bus headed toward downtown


Same dude



Downtown street scene, Rua das Amazonas



Traffic jam, Rua das Amazonas, between Coração Eucarístico and Barro Preto


Small street bar downtown



On bus 9410 just before my stop in Coração Eucarístico



This is less here to be beautiful, more to be like "holy crap, they actually have these here too?!"


Instead of putting money in a counter next to the driver, in Brazil there sits a person just behind the driver (the trocador, literally "the change person") that collects riders' money and allows them to pass through a turn-sty. With all the people that can crowd onto buses, this speeds up transit time, as the driver doesn't have to wait for each rider to pay before starting off again.


Here's another trocador, on the 4111 bus in the Padre Eustáquio neighborhood



A truck laden with bricks waits next to the 9410 on its way downtown



My reflection in the plate glass barrier just in front of the exit in the back of the bus

Education in Brazil

First, a poem:

The aperture of my eye
catches a palm leaf yielding
delicately to gravity, an awning
for the beautiful horizon beyond.
The wind tickles its fronds,
which dance like a centipede
flipped over onto its back.
Blue shutters open into a
white walled room, grains of
hardwood leaving no corner
for an echo to hide. Long
Latin vowels and sharp, almost
Cyrillic fricatives bounce around
the classroom like tennis balls,
reaching my ear canals and
bottlenecking into my brain.
It’s 7:30 in the morning,
and my professor for my
7am História de Minas Gerais
class has yet to arrive. Rumor
has it that she was sent to the
hospital yesterday, gravely ill.
I hope that she’s all right.
In the meantime, palm fronds,
the wind, the rising tropical sun,
gíria hurled mercilessly at white,
hardwood walls, blank, tired faces,
this short reprieve of English,
teach my first lesson
on my first day of school in Brazil.


I wrote that back on the 13th of February, as I waited for the ball to drop and my academic year of Brazilian education to begin. The ball dropped, but somewhat anticlimactically. The professor for this class had indeed been admitted to the hospital with an illness that hampered her sense of balance. She returned the very next week, still a little slow and weak, but nonetheless fit to teach class for the rest of the semester. The class I was waiting for, the class this professor taught, was History of Minas Gerais I—Minas Gerais is the state I am living in. I’m also taking Brazilian Historiography I—where we’ll read, among other things, Gilberto Freyre’s controversial 1930s classic Casa Grande e Senzala, loosely translated as The Masters and the Slaves—and Brazilian Culture and Folklore, where we’ll study the surge of anthropological study and research in Brazil since the 1960s. I’m limited to only three classes by the university, since I’m not a true exchange student. However, these three courses by themselves are proving to be quite a lot of work, posing several challenges that have been especially surprising to this Gringo.

First, I swear, half the population of Brazil (really, the male half) has ADD. Each class of mine has about 40 to 50 people. The teaching style is predominantly lecture, with the professor at the front of the classroom giving his or her lecture to the students scribbling notes in their desks. Except not everyone is scribbling notes. The students, mainly guys, who choose to sit in the back of the classroom—which is indeed a classroom, not a big or even a smallish lecture hall—freely break into conversation with each other throughout the lecture, which in no way seems to faze the professor. Meanwhile, those who choose to listen, mainly girls, listen. The problem for someone wanting to listen to a lecture taught in a third language is that the conversations in the background cannot possibly be tuned out. Instead, Portuguese from all sides mixes with the stream of Portuguese coming from the professor as it all bounces in echoes off of the white hardwood walls of the classroom. A girl in my History of Minas class asked me one day if I was getting everything ok, and I told her how it was hard to understand absolutely everything with all the talking going on all around me. I told her how if students persisted to talk like that in an American college classroom, they would be asked to stop and then to leave. She found such classroom etiquette almost draconian, yet another victory for wild and carefree Brazilian culture over cold, stuffy America.

The next challenge I’ve found is that hardly anyone buys books here for classes, a huge change coming from a culture that requires its college students to buy books at exorbitant prices. Professors will usually Xerox articles week by week that they want their students to read. However, if an entire book or even a chapter of a book is assigned, students must go to the library to check out the book—there are usually several copies of widely-assigned books, though not nearly enough for a single class, let alone any other classes that assigned that book—to either read or Xerox it at their leisure, keeping in mind that their classmates are looking to do the same. There is a tiny, hole-in-the-wall bookstore at the top of campus that has a few copies of popularly assigned books for sale at 15% markdowns for students. However, hardly anyone uses this service. The idea of owning a book for a class is as absurd to students here as punishing students for talking in class. I have already bought two books assigned for two of my classes from the school book-hole-in-the-wall, simply because Rotary is giving me the money to do so and because I would take much longer than the average Brazilian to read a highly coveted library book. I must admit, I enjoy the concept of being free from ridiculously high prices for books, yet as expensive as they are, I won’t lie, I do enjoy owning the books themselves. Somewhere there’s got to be a happy, Braziliamerican medium.

This may sound a bit ethnocentric, but you’d think that in a country where a college education is so sought after, students who get the opportunity to go to college would both respect the sanctity of the classroom and jump at the chance to own their schoolbooks, in essence a piece of their very education. (I must qualify such a statement, too, by saying that it comes solely from anecdotal evidence; it could well be such behavior is only found here at PUC-Minas, and further only in its history department.) Basically, the Brazilian education system goes kinda like this. The Brazilian Government pays for its equivalent of K-12 public education. Municipal governments are in charge of primary schools, while the state governments take care of secondary schools. The federal government directly funds its aptly named Federal Universities, of which each of Brazil’s 27 states (to my knowledge) has one. Studying at a Federal University comes at no cost to the student. However, it is extremely difficult to gain admission to the Federais. A prospective college student must take an exam called the vestibular before graduating high school. The vestibular is somewhat like our ACT or SAT, except that each department at each university has its own version of the test. Thus, a student must know exactly what he or she wants to study before graduating high school (i.e. no “open majors”), and the student must know exactly where he or she wants to go. For most Brazilian students, this second issue is easy. Unlike us crazy Americans who want to leave home so badly when it comes to applying to colleges, the vast majority of Brazilians opt to apply to the universities closest to where they live, more often than not living with their parents while they go to school (and often until they get married, as well). Thus, a high school senior from Belo Horizonte or the surrounding area will likely take the vestibular for the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. However, as I said above, it’s very difficult to gain admission to the Federais, and so many students will take the vestibular for nearby private universities as well. Thus, the same high school senior will likely take both the vestibular for UFMG and PUC-Minas in the subject of his or her choice. If it turns out that the student doesn’t get into UFMG, they still have the chance to get into PUC-Minas, though the trade-off is that he or she (or his or her parents) will have to foot the bill for the student’s education instead of the government.

**However, studying at a private college in Brazil costs about as much, roughly as studying at a state school in the U.S. Relatively, therefore, it’s not as expensive as say Notre Dame or Luther.

Going back to my ethnocentric comment about valuing education…

I posted earlier of how important it is in Brazil to have connections if you want to get anywhere. A college education is equally important if you want to get a job that will keep you at or above the “middle class.” According to the 2008 edition of Brazil’s delightful annual Almanaque Abril (which, ironically enough, comes out every January…), in 2006 more than 5 million students took various versions of the vestibular, competing for about 2.4 million admission spots at colleges around the country. Thus, every year half of those students who want to go to college cannot. To make matters, well, more interesting, the odds are stacked in the favor of the wealthy. Students can “opt” to go to public high school for free. For most, this is less a choice than it is an obligation. For those who can afford it—12% of all high school students in 2006, according to Almanaque Abril 2008—the best option is to attend a private high school. At such a school, students are offered the best education money can buy, far better than at schools funded by the state. Usually, students who attend private school can also afford to attend supplementary classes in a foreign language—usually English—, as well as courses to aid them in scoring high on the vestibular—like our Kaplan courses offered to help college grads score high on the GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc. Assuming that these students are all looking to go to college—an assumption based on the fact that they come from wealthy families whose status they’ll try to emulate—, and assuming that this 12% of all Brazilian high school students will indeed pass the vestibular and gain admission to some university—an assumption based on the sheer amount of resources they have at their disposal, I haven’t dug up any statistics on their success rate yet—, then the remaining 88% of Brazilian high school students attending public schools who are also looking to pass the vestibular and go to college essentially have to compete for the remaining admission spots not awarded to the 12% elite. The odds for the remaining 88% to get into any college are thus less than 50%, and the odds of getting into the free Federais are even smaller as these are the preferred destinations of the 12%. The debate about the connection between race and class in Brazil, about how the elite are predominantly white, how this white elite keeps getting richer through the Brazilian education system and the predominantly Afro-Brazilian poor keep getting poorer, and about the racial quota system at federal university admissions offices, are all tightly tied to the issue of class disparity in education in Brazil. These debates I will save for another post. For now, at least anecdotally, I'll simply state that anyone so fortunate as to get into college in Brazil, even a private college that one must pay for, should relish such an opportunity and consider it sacred.

At least so say I. Though maybe I’m just bitter at those yakking away in the back of the class.

Thanks for reading! This wasn’t by any means a sociological case based on any research I have done, just a glimpse into one of the various issues that Brazil faces. And that’s not to say that our own country doesn’t have its own issues in education, namely how ridiculously expensive even public universities have become, leaving graduates with more debt and less hope for finding a job that pays enough to pay it off.

Next post, more photos!

My First Rotary Presentation

The Rotary Club that is sponsoring me here in Belo Horizonte meets for dinner every Wednesday evening from 7 to 8 in a downtown 16-story building whose construction the club paid for. At right is a view from above - as a Brazilian might say, borrowed from French, “Que chique!” (However, I should point out that though the building is indeed called the “Rotary Building”, that’s not to say that the club uses the entire building; for a return on its investment, the club rents out floors 2 through 15 to various businesses and only uses the top floor for its meetings). Last Wednesday, February 13th, was the first meeting I attended since arriving. Really, it was more of a party than a meeting. The new District Governor for Rotary District 4520 (which comprises most of the western portion of Minas Gerais up to the capital, Brasília), Aluízio Quintão, is a longtime member of the Rotary Club of Belo Horizonte. Last Wednesday was a 3-hour spectacle in his honor. I was lucky enough to be invited! After the meeting-party, Marco told me that from then on every Wednesday would be a regular meeting, and I could attend whenever I wanted. I asked him when I would be giving my first presentation, and he told me he would inform me of this when the club had a better grasp of its schedule.

On Tuesday evening, Marco called just to check in and see how I was doing. I told him how I played soccer with PUC classmates on Saturday and got more-or-less killed, but then redeemed myself by dominating in basketball just afterward (which is saying a lot about the skill level here – I’m terrible at basketball). I told him how I went to the theatre with Piedade, Ricardo, and our neighbor Dona Dirce, how I didn’t understand the words all that well but still enjoyed it very much. It was about a hypothetical meeting in which two of Brazil’s greatest troubadours for different generations—Noel Rosa, from the 1930s, and Chico Buarque, from the 60s to the present—traded philosophies and songs. Anyway, after reporting the events of my week to Marco, he reminded me about the meeting tomorrow, telling me once again that I wasn’t required to attend but that I would be welcome to if I wanted. I told him that I did, in fact, want to come to see what a “regular meeting” was like.

At 6pm yesterday I hopped on the 5401 bus just outside my apartment that follows the Rua Amazonas—one of the city’s main arteries—from my neighborhood into downtown. It was, of course, rush hour, and the going was slow. Even before we reached the heart of downtown the bus was beyond standing-room-only capacity. For those IC natives reading this, imagine being on a Red/Blue Route or Interdorm Cambus for 25 minutes. I got off at the street closest to the Rotary Building, Rua São Paulo, but I suddenly caught a bad taste of dyslexia and started going into the opposite direction of my intended target. It wasn’t til about half a mile later that I realized how off I was, and so I turned around and started powerwalking back in the direction from whence I had come. Marco had wanted me to get to the meeting around 6:45 so that it could start promptly at 7. I ended up getting there at 6:57. Marco, however, didn’t seem to mind—maybe it was because I arrived in perfect Brazilian time, when everything happens 10-15 minutes later than planned. I recognized faces from the last meeting-party and greeted them. I saw new faces and greeted them too. I was sweating profusely from the powerwalk and was a little embarrassed in the presence of such high society (one member of the club is a former ambassador to Uruguay, another a former chief Brazilian consul in Canada, among others). I tried my best to enter into their conversation about Brazilian law and politics, and was soon relieved when after a few minutes Marco called the meeting to order. I started toward one of the common circular tables positioned in front of the long rectangular table at which Marco and other esteemed guests sat. Yet as I was pulling out a chair to sit in and finally cool off, Marco beckoned to me, telling me that I was to sit next to him at the head table tonight. Cool! I thought. This should be fun! I got up to the table and sat next to him, beaming at the faces in front of me, honored to be in front of them, still wiping my forehead with a napkin. And then I heard these words from Marco: “I’d like to introduce to you all Brett Johnson, our Rotary Foundation Scholar. Brett will be with us until December studying Brazilian history and geography. Tonight’s meeting is dedicated to him, and in a little bit he will get up and say a few words about what brought him here to be with us.” Everyone clapped. I sat there stunned. The color that the tropical sun had been painting on my face had to have suddenly disappeared. My nearly dry forehead suddenly became a swamp. I barely made out what Marco said for the next ten minutes before it was time to go and grab dinner; my mind was racing as to what I was going to say, and how I was going to say it in Portuguese. I hadn’t prepared anything! What happened to the regular meeting that I was welcome to attend whenever I wanted? What happened to being informed of when I would actually have to get up and speak to the club?

After ten minutes of talking, Marco released the club to go and grab dinner from the buffet line prepared for us. I asked him how long he wanted me to speak. About ten minutes, he said. Ten minutes, cool, I could do that. I walked as slowly as I possibly could from the head table, trying to gain some composure and collect my thoughts, as well as my balance. I loaded my plate up with what looked good (I was starving!), and headed back to the table. Marco joined me a few minutes later and we shared some chit-chat about traveling and school and the food. Before I knew it, my plate was empty. My moment had come.

I walked over to the podium, and in my slowest Portuguese possible, thanked the club for their hospitality, and for being such gracious hosts. I told them that I came from Iowa, and that Rotary’s founder, Paul Harris, had graduated from the UI law school just after the turn of the century. This perked up their ears. I continued by telling them how traveling and Rotary had always been important pieces in my life, recounting the various trips I had taken and the various Rotary functions I had been involved with. I told them I was here to study Brazilian history and geography, focusing on the coffee industry as the foundation for my studies. I told them that I couldn’t wait to begin sharing the culture of my country with them, and I promised that I would take everything I learned from my time in Brazil and be an ambassador for them when I returned home. I thanked them again. They clapped. It was over. The ten minutes flew by faster than ten minutes ever had. I was grateful. I was relieved. I was left wondering where such composure came from, such an ability to improvise in a third language. Marco said a few more words about my being here, another member got up to say a few words about the District Conference that would be coming up on the first of May, and then Marco dismissed us. I shook hands with members, thanked them all again one by one, then hopped in the elevator, walked to a bus stop where I knew there’d be a bus to take me back home, and hopped on it when it came. I stared out the window at the bright city lights that flew by. One speech down, I thought. At least 9 more to go. After tonight, the next nine will be a piece of cake.

Thanks for reading! Next post: some insight into the Brazilian education system. Be well all!

Brazilian Domestication (Updated with photos!)

I already consider myself something of a domestic god. Laundry, dishwashing, cleaning, baking are all in my repertoire. My cooking skills could use a little honing, but even apart from those I feel I’ve reached godlike status in home economics. Now, after just a little over a week in Brazil, I may just have surpassed divine status. And with 40 or so more weeks to go, I may indeed come home a cross between the best of Bob Vila, Rachel Rae, and my grandma Helen.


Since the day after arriving here, I’ve been living in an apartment a couple blocks away from university with a 50-something year old woman named Piedade (for those of you who know my extended family, imagine a female version of my grandpa Bob: hardworking, strong-willed, with very large, thick-fingered hands). On my third day living here, I came home after an exhausting day exploring my relatively nice neighboring and went to the sink to get a glass of water. I filled my glass, then turned the faucet back to off, only to feel the internal plastic piece responsible for controlling the whole “water-turning-on-and-off” mechanism crack in half. Water started leaking everywhere. While I started freaking out, Piedade found the situation funny (I half expected her to be furious), and told me that all we had to do for the time being was shut off the flow of water in the bathroom bordering the kitchen (which incidentally meant I had to shower for a day in the phone booth-sized service bathroom), and plug up the pipe coming out of the wall leading to the sink. (I’m sure there are more technical terms for all the mechanics I’m describing here, though I don’t know their names in either English or Portuguese). Two days later I found myself on a bus to downtown, where with some luck I managed to find the store that Piedade informed me would have the proper replacement part. Upon returning, I fixed the faucet. I’m now a certified plumber.


That was my foreign domestic moment number one. The second came just yesterday when I became confronted with a literally mounting problem that I had ignored since arriving: I needed to do laundry. My new roommate, Ricardo, a tall, skinny, fun-loving 18-year-old “freshman” (calouro in Portuguese) at PUC (I’ll tell his story in a future post), said he had found a woman working at a nearby bakery who advertised that she could do laundry, though this involved presenting her with your dirty clothes on a Friday only, which she would henceforth return the very next Monday. With no clean underwear and only one clean pair of any kind of pants left, this was an unfeasible option if there ever was one. My next best bet was to go to a nearby “Laundromat” (though, as you’ll see, this translation is a generous one) with my suitcase-full of fetid garments to finally tackle the issue. Instead of finding a large hall full of self-serve washers and dryers, I found what looked like a small dry-cleaning service operated by a pale, lifeless young woman. Apparently, she or someone else in back did the washing and drying, while all I had to do was pay and wait. “How much to wash these clothes?” I asked her, showing her the suitcase. As if reading a standard response-in-a-can from a card, she droned, “You can only drop off your clothes here on Tuesdays, and they’ll be done by the following Monday.” “Six days?!” I asked with incredulous, wide eyes. “Yes,” she nodded, her head looking like a limp rag on a clothesline. I gave her a half-hearted thanks and left to face my last remaining option: I’d have to wash all my dirty clothes from the last 9 days by hand. I went to the grocery store—conveniently right next to the “Laundromat” on the way back home—and picked up some detergent, some gloves, a brush, and some clothespins. Two hours later, about a third of my soiled wardrobe, the amount that could fit on Piedade’s drying racks, had been cleaned and hung to dry. Today I’ll take on the next third. Tomorrow the last. And from each day-or-two forward, I’ll be washing a day-or-two’s worth of clothes Little House on the Prairie style so as not to make such an event out of this simple household task.


Finally, a happier bit of domestication and a reviving of the most basic of my barista skills: coffee making. Brazilian coffee is bought in packages of very fine grounds of deep, robust roasts. Electric coffeemakers do exist here, but the traditional way to brew here—the way even many “middle to upper class” brew it—is to pour boiling water through a filter of grounds into a thermos, yadda yadda yadda. Child’s play! Altogether this method makes a nice, black, almost chewable cup of coffee that fills you with the will to confront any domestic task, expected or not, that may come your way.

Until next post, be well all!

Photos... Finally!

Here are some photos, finally, of Brazil and of the trip down here. I think I got them in reverse order of how i wanted them displayed - I'm still getting used to the whole blogging thing. I hope everyone is doing well no matter where you find yourself in the world! I'll be back with more soon.

Tchau-tchau!

Belo Horizonte from PUC Campus

Entrance to the Pontifícia Universidade Católica campus

Gate in Atlanta, waiting for our flight to São Paulo

Connections

Hello friends!

Sorry it’s taken a few days to finally find the time to sit and write, not to mention find readily available internet access (guess I guessed wrong… also, the connection speed is super slow at the university, so photos will have to wait until i find a faster one, unfortunately...). The last few of days have been exhausting. Of course there was the whole arriving thing, which involved four flights, Cedar Rapids-Cincinnati-Atlanta-São Paulo-Belo Horizonte. All told I arrived Tuesday almost exactly 24 hours after checking in at the Cedar Rapids airport. Since arriving, it’s been virtually nothing but non-stop rapid fire Portuguese, which right out of the gate was no easy task for a mind working on three hours of sleep that hasn’t regularly used the language in a couple of months. Picture a middle-aged white guy trying to dance samba at Carnaval—that’s what it’s been like trying to re-adapt to this song of a language….

Most of my time in the first two days was spent with my Rotary Host Counselor, Marco Antônio. Under normal circumstances, I would be very grateful that Marco is a type that likes to talk a lot, especially since virtually every word out of his mouth is dripping with juicy insight into the ways of Brazilian society, law, and history. With all the static crackling in my head, though, I was able to catch about half of his words, and retain an even smaller fraction of that. Tuesday, after a good ten-hour sleep, I felt I could keep up much better, and as this week has gone on I feel I’m improving even more.

Marco is one of the top judges in the state of Minas Gerais, the state of which Belo Horizonte is the capitol. He has made it no secret to me that he wields a lot of power, as he has pretty much the last word when it comes to laying down the law on a variety of cases. He openly admits (really it’s no secret inside Brazil or abroad) that there exists a great deal of corruption at all levels of Brazilian society, from the lowest ranking police officers to the most prominent politicians in the country. Thus, the power vested in him by the law indeed has the potential to be tested, though from what I’ve read of Marco as a person, he hasn’t been one to yield to such tests. For a glimpse into the culture of corruption in Brazil, check out the 2007 documentary Manda Bala, “Send a Bullet.” It’s awesome, though a bit graphic, especially for lovers of frogs!

Marco embodies one of the most important things you could learn about Brazil: to make it here, you have to have connections. That isn’t to say that good ol’ American “Protestant Work Ethic” doesn’t apply in Catholic Brazil; Marco himself came from what you might call a “middle class” family (though that term could encompass any number of virtually infinite strata in the “middle” of the class spectrum). To reach the point where he could consider himself a coveted connection, he had to study hard and get a bit lucky along the way. Marco, in fact, was awarded the same scholarship I did, which he used to study law for a year in Lisbon in the mid-80s. He has also traveled extensively to the U.S., South Africa, and other parts of Europe, a luxury in Brazil that I hypothesize must pay perpetual dividends. Marco got his law degree from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC, pronounced “pookie”) here in Belo Horizonte, the same school I will be starting at next week. He has climbed his way up a very steep hierarchical judicial system, in which he often had to compete with up to 2000 people for a job he eventually won. I’m sure as the weeks move along and my mind becomes more pliable to Portuguese, I’ll be able to garner more stories from Marco about the steps he had to take to get to where he is now (there’s only one office higher than his in the state). For now, I’ll leave you with this anecdote. On my first day here, just before leaving for home after he dropped me off at my hotel and my long-awaited ten-hour sleep, Marco gave me his card and told me that if I ever found myself in any kind of trouble with the law I should tell whatever authority I was with that I was under his care. He said they would get really scared and hand me over to him no questions asked. I really, really do not want to test this scenario out, though I admit it would be a sight to see!

This is about as substantive as I can get in this the first post since arriving. I know that as the days roll along I’ll be able to absorb little by little a greater understanding of this country, this city, and the little neighborhood—the Coração Eurarístico, Eucharistic Heart—I now call home. Until our next virtual meeting, be excellent everyone! Sejam excelentes todos!