Ricardo

It’s about time I told his story.

I moved into my pensão universitária, my room in Dona Piedade’s apartment, on the day after I arrived in Belo Horizonte. Four days later, as I returned from the hardware store with the parts needed to fix the faucet I broke, I discovered I had a new flatmate. Ricardo Mallaco and his parents were discussing the rent situation with Piedade. “Aha!” she exclaimed when I walked in the door, “Here is your American roommate that I was talking about!” We exchanged greetings and they expressed their surprise that an American had actually learned Portuguese (lots of people find this surprising). Ricardo and his father, Nelson, then switched over to speaking English, though only for a few minutes so as not to keep Lígia, who spoke no English, out of the loop. Ricardo told me that he had been an exchange student for the 2006-07 American academic year at Aquin Catholic High School in Freeport, Illinois, a small town near Rockford. I told him that I was from Iowa City, in Iowa, that state bordering Illinois to the west. His eyes lit up. “Did you go to the University of Iowa?” he asked me. “Yeah,” I answered, “why?” He proceeded to tell me that his host brother during his stay in Freeport was a freshman at UI, and he had gone several times with his host family to visit him in IC, even going to a UI women’s basketball game on one occasion. He even had a shirt that read "Kinnick Stadium, this is sacred ground."

I was shocked.

How, 5,000 miles away from home, I could end up living with a dude that had set foot in my hometown, was completely beyond my ability to wrap my head around the eternal cosmic dance of fate and freewill.

As I have said probably several times before this post, Ricardo is an 18-year-old freshman (“calouro” in Portuguese, which means something like “young and inexperienced animal”) studying journalism at PUC-Minas. Unlike most university students here—who either live with their parents if they are from Belo Horizonte itself, or with a relative or close family friend in BH if they are from the interior of Minas Gerais—Ricardo has come to BH from Vitória, a coastal city of about 400,000, about 8 hours by car “due” east of BH (the main highway connecting the two cities is as winding as any in the Great Smoky Mountains). He, along with more than 1,100,000 other Brazilians, is Baptist. He is a descendant of Italian immigrants on both sides of his family. Besides our IC connection, he and I share passions for photography, international news, and learning about other cultures. When my Portuguese proves insufficient in any given circumstance, his English comes through in the clutch. Really, coming into this whole experience blindly, I don’t think I could’ve found a better Brazilian roommate. During my time here, we’ve played soccer and basketball together at PUC on weekends, we get lunch or dinner at our “dining halls”, and, as I posted earlier, I spent the week in Vitória with his family a couple weeks ago.


And now we’re going to become the founding members of a Brazilian “república”, basically an apartment inhabited only by college students, which, though nothing specially back home, is such a rare occurrence here with most students choosing to live at home that it warrants such an ingenious title. The idea is that the apartment is like a country, and every citizen has a duty to his or her country, to keep it clean and orderly, and to abide by the laws that they the citizens established by referendum upon the country’s founding. Thus, Ricardo, myself, and two other classmates of Ricardo’s will each become the president, the finance minister, and head of the environmental protection agency of our fledgling country, affectionately named “República 4111” after Ricardo found a mangled placard of one of the 4111-route buses on the street, which I guess will serve as our “flag.”

Though we will always be grateful of our colonial roots and all that we gained from them under the governance of Queen Piedade, we have hereby respectfully declared our independence, effective tomorrow, April the 4th, 2008. Like any nascent country, it will take time and perhaps a civil war or two before we become a dominant power, or at least able to stand on our own two feet. Over the next week we will be accumulating the necessary capital to invest in our country’s future. We are taking bids for a cheap combined cable-internet-phone plan through a local ISP, but our telecommunications infrastructure sadly may not be up and running for at least a week, maybe more. I thus offer my most humble apologies to you, my audience of foreign dignitaries, as I will have limited ability to correspond with you through this and other internet-based channels during this time. But not for long. And then you will all be global partners as our nation rises to glory. Long live 4111!

By the way, if you want to send diplomatic messages or foreign aid (☺ alright, sorry, this joke’s gone on long enough…), the address of our new republic is:

Rua Dom Modesto Augusto, 181, Apt 104
Coração Eucarístico
Belo Horizonte, MG, Brasil 30353-630