Brett in Brazil

Video of Images from the Projeto Rondon: Palmópolis and Surrounding Areas, July 2008

2009-04-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

CS Monitor: "The Obama of Brazil"

2008-11-12T07:38:00.000-08:00

Here's an excellent editorial from the Christian Science Monitor about Barack Obama, Brazil's President Lula, and the future of U.S.-Brazil relations. It's a great supplement to the post below. Enjoy!

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1112/p08s01-comv.html

Obamamania in Brazil: Change we can believe in, or more of the same (only jazzed up)?

2008-11-11T16:51:00.000-08:00

Like a proud Brazilian soccer fan wearing his team’s jersey on the day after they won a huge match, I went to class November 5th with my Obama ’08 T-shirt that my friend Pamela had brought me from home when she visited back in June. It’s true: if I didn’t make it obvious already through trying oh so hard to be objective in the analyses here in this blog, I am, in fact, an Obama supporter. As someone who has heard and empathized with the voices of world citizens frustrated not only with the policies, but with the arrogance of the Bush Administration, I have long been pulling for Obama in hopes of, as the President-elect himself puts it, “restoring America’s image in the world.”

November 5th seemed to show that such a restoration was beginning. That Wednesday was like a second birthday. Classmates and professors greeted me with a smile and a “parabéns!” (congratulations!). Others exclaimed joyfully, “Ele ganhou!” “He won!” As for the throngs of unknowns I ran into that day, pretty much all of them stared at my chest as if I were Dolly Parton. Yet none of these gawking strangers said anything. Either they didn’t care (more on this later), or they were just behaving like they would any other day, not interfering with a stranger’s business, even a stranger with the name of the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world on his chest.

And that’s fine. Really, I wasn’t expecting complete strangers to stop me and congratulate me for the results of an election that wasn’t their own. While Obama may be the next “most power man in the world,” he’s America’s president, not Brazil’s. To think otherwise would be to continue the same arrogance that tainted the last eight years. I wasn’t wearing Obama’s name to be arrogant. I wore it out of pride. Since my first trip to Spain in March 2001, every time I have traveled abroad I have done so with the dark cloud of George W. Bush hanging over my head. W will still be president by the time I leave Brazil, but until that day the promise of a brighter future under an Obama Administration will wash out the shadows cast by Bush’s cloud. For these next three-and-a-half weeks, I can proclaim my nationality with greater pride than ever before.

Among the international hoi polloi, Obama is perhaps even more revered in Brazil than he is in Europe, where he drew a crowd of 200,000 at a speech in Berlin back in July. This because, aside from his fresh politics, the fact that he is black (or, perhaps better put, “biracial”) makes him more identifiable with the more than 40% of Brazilians who would list their skin color as “black” or “brown.” The notion of race in Brazil and the difference between it and the notion of race in the U.S. are very complicated subjects. In a nutshell, populations of color in both countries have been historically marginalized, though through different forms of discrimination. The U.S. wrote its discrimination into law, and despite the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, blacks and whites (and Latinos and Arab-Americans, etc.) still live very much separated from one another, culturally, linguistically, economically, and geographically speaking. While racial prejudice in Brazil has never been made law, and people of all colors can quite often be seen interacting together almost as if on the set of a P-C Bud Light commercial, discrimination still exists latently and subtly in Brazil’s often-fabled “racial democracy,” popping up in places like idioms and soap operas every now and then. The bottom line: for Afro-Brazilians to see an African-American elected president is to receive the hope that a member of their own minority could one day too rise up to lead both minority and majority.

One could argue that Brazil has already witnessed an election as historic as Obama’s. In 2002, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist trade unionist, the son of a poor working class family, with no formal education to his credit, (not to mention he's missing his left pinkie finger), became the first Brazilian president to come from outside the traditional political elite. He, too, was elected on a platform of change, and during his 6 years in office he has delivered on many of his original campaign promises, such as helping the poor and growing Brazil’s economy independently from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF (corruption and the drug wars in the country's favelas remain to be tackled). Brazil now enjoys one of the world’s top 10 economies, it is nearly completely energy independent, and it is by far Latin America’s dominant political and economic actor, especially as U.S. influence has retreated from the region. Lula’s popularity rating is as high as Bush’s is low. Hence, perhaps, the apathy of my anonymous passers-by last Wednesday: Brazil has become so powerful, why should the results of a U.S. election, even one so historic, matter to the average Brazilian?

The U.S. presidential race reflected waning North American influence (and interest) in Latin America. Only in the final debate between McCain and Obama did such subjects as Colombian and Peruvian free trade agreements, Brazilian ethanol, and what to do with Hugo Chávez get touched, albeit very briefly. The fact is that the economy, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and healthcare all weigh heavier than virtually any policy toward Latin America in the mind of the average American. Even immigration, the Latin-flavored hot button issue 3 years ago, was hardly broached. Brazilians are certainly content to welcome a U.S. president that’s more humble and open to dialogue and diplomacy than his predecessor, with the end to the internationally deplored war in Iraq probably in sight. But what does an Obama Administration have to do, specifically, with Brazil?

After the euphoria of this last week has begun to settle, I’ve found that some members of the Brazilian media, as well as friends, classmates, and professors are asking exactly that question. The only concretely known agenda of Obama’s in relation to Brazil is his plan to continue to protect the American ethanol industry, subsidizing research and production at home and slapping tariffs on imports of the Brazilian stuff, policies which John McCain opposed. However, a slight sense of optimism might be in the air in Brazil with relation to U.S. protectionism. A recent article in the right-wing weekly Veja magazine insinuated that Brazil’s ethanol industry is so superior to the United States’, that corn is becoming so much more valuable for food instead of fuel in a world with ever more mouths to feed, and Obama is so bent on achieving near total independence from foreign oil in the next decade, that the U.S. will have no choice but to open its ports to Brazilian ethanol. We shall certainly see.

The only other and much more vague policy of Obama’s toward Brazil has to do with deforestation in the Amazon. In an earlier post I outlined the general argument surrounding the issue of sovereignty and deforestation of the Amazon. According to a recent article on the BBC News website, Obama said he values “incentives to maintain Latin American forests.” As the skilled politician he is, Obama is most likely being deliberately vague to appease both the Brazilian and the European-North American environmentalist sides of this delicate issue. Yet anything short of giving full support to 100% Brazilian sovereignty of the Amazon (or at least the two-thirds that lie inside Brazil’s borders) could be seen by Brazilians as tantamount to a call for the forest’s internationalization, a definite no-no. Indeed, Obama will have to tread very carefully when approaching this issue.

On the bright side, when the time comes to address American relations with Brazil on issues known and unknown, a more dialogue-oriented Obama Administration will have some influential Brazilian figures to guide it. According to the same Veja article mentioned above, Brazil’s current Minister for Strategic Affairs, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a respected figure in his country on the issue of the Amazon, was once Obama’s professor at Harvard. Unger and current Brazilian Ambassador to the U.S., Antonio Patriota, will act as the initial go-betweens with the new Obama Administration in hopes of creating stronger diplomatic ties, paving the way to deal more fruitfully with what issues may come.

Still, however successful those ties become may not be known for some time, according to the same BBC article. With the aforementioned top priorities already piled high on Obama’s plate, direct dealings with Brazil and other Latin American nations—apart from the next meeting of the Organization of American States in April—may not come about until 12 to 14 months from now.

In the meantime, while hope-filled Obamaniacs in Brazil join those around the world to watch Obama’s every move as president as diligently and expectantly as they would follow the 8 o’clock novela, many of my colleagues at PUC have already formed their opinion about the extent of change an Obama Administration will bring: none. My “Political Economy of Africa” professor remarked that systemically, no great changes could possibly happen in the world over the next 4 years. He argued, rather, that global systemic pressures would be too great for Obama to overcome, and that the very nature of the American democratic system, homogeneous behind the façade of polar Republican and Democratic ideologies, would likewise fetter Obama’s idealism. My “History and Culture of Minas Gerais” professor echoed my Africa prof. She expounded to the class her belief that American foreign policy will always remain the same, no matter who leads it. She went on to say Obama would do little more than defend the interests of the United States in the midst of its decline, thus leading not to more diplomacy, but more wars, the soonest of which would be with Iran. She criticized the Brazilian press for sensationalizing the Obama phenomenon, instilling false hope in average Brazilians, making them wait with bated breath at the next American President’s each and every move. Students around me nodded in agreement and proceeded to vent the frustrations that I have heard all too often about how American culture and way of life would continue to alienate those of Brazil. If anything, such alienation would only increase with all of Brazil tuned in to follow the "Obama Years."

What this says is that the present generational crop of budding Brazilian academics will continue to carry the flag of pessimistic Marxist ideology, denouncing the U.S. government until the candidate of the American Socialist Worker’s party is elected president (i.e., hell will freeze over first). I know I’ve expressed my conditional sympathy with my colleagues' ideals here in this blog in past posts, conditional in that in the end I don’t believe a classless society is the answer to the criticisms of capitalism that have only crescendoed around me since the financial crisis deepened in September. Neo-liberalist capitalism may be showing its inherent fallibility with the present crisis, yet communism proved itself a nonviable option throughout the 20th century. A middle road is necessary, one in which government can trump an out-of-control market, and can protect human rights around the world to such things as economic development, education, health care, and a clean environment, rights that the market alone fails to provide. The hope that Obama's campaign and subsequent election instilled in me has not made me naïve enough to think that a President Obama can provide that perfect middle road. Yes, systemic pressures will hold back his idealistic visions of America and the world; it doesn't take a Marxist outlook to believe so. But I do believe he, more than anyone else who could’ve been chosen to fulfill his new role, has the capacity to push back at those pressures. Exactly how well he deals with each of his unenviable number of pressures, be they in America, Iran, or Brazil, remains to be seen by more than 6 billion pairs of eyes.

And I’ll be frank: nothing would give me greater pleasure than to report back to my non-believing PUC colleagues in 4 (and hopefully 8) years’ time and remind them just how well he did.

Brazil and the Global Financial Crisis - Parte Dois

2008-10-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

In the last post I posted a link to a NY Times article that described how Latin American countries, including Brazil, aren't immune to the financial plague that's spread out from Wall Street. The Brazilian real went from around 1.75 to the dollar to nearly 2.50 to the dollar in the course of a couple weeks. It has since stabilized at around 2.10 - 2.15 to the dollar in recent days, which, according to my limited economic knowledge, probably actually sits pretty well with exporters of Brazilian commodities - high enough to drive down the price of their products, not so high as to preclude returns on past investments. Access to credit, however, will still be hard to come by, as firms around the world are finding out.

So no, Brazil, like pretty much everyone, won't escape this crisis unscathed. Yet compared to most countries, Brazil, it seems, should weather the storm fairly well. In the latest weekly issue of Istoé magazine, a quote from the Director General of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahnn, received some considerable attention. "In 2009," he said (and this is my translation from Portuguese), "developed countries will grow near 0%; in other words, 100% of growth will come from developing countries and countries with little wealth." The IMF predicted Brazil will grow 3.5% in '09. Certainly a modest prospect, though nothing like China's projected 9.3% or India's 6.9% growth. 2009 growth for the United States will be around 0.8%, with the Eurozone economy growing an equally paltry 0.7%, according to the IMF.

Why is Brazil sitting so pretty? Istoé highlights a few reasons:

Stricter banking regulation, and banks that have recently proven themselves three times more profitable than U.S. banks
A reserve of $200 billion, which the Brazilian government can use to ease credit concerns for some of the country's larger indebted firms, as well as guarantee national foreign debt
An agricultural export economy that will see little drop in demand for coffee, soybeans, ethanol, and orange juice from markets in Europe and Asia
A robust domestic economy on which to prop the country up if the export market goes lean, and a booming consumer market that's starting to attract the attention of foreign investors
An ever-diversifying industrial sector, manufacturing everything from flex-fuel cars to regional jets to laptops to feed the high domestic demand for consumer goods

Add to that the fact that Brazil is almost energy independent (and will probably become a petroleum exporting country by the time newly discovered off-shore reserves are tapped in the next decade) and one sees a country ready to face the fiercest of economic storms.

A week-and-a-half ago, President Bush got on the red phone to Presidente Lula and asked that the G-20 (the group, led by Brazil, that represents the world's 19 wealthiest nations plus the whole of the European Union) convene for an emergency summit in Washington immediately after a similar meeting by the G-7. Oh how the tables have turned. Now Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega would come to Washington with $20 billion dollars to offer to inject into gasping credit markets, unlike predecessors who showed up at the thrown of the Empire on their knees.

It's no wonder that Lula has an air of Chicken Little about him: "It's their crisis," he said earlier this month.

Latin America in the wake of North America's financial crisis

2008-10-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 wrested the Americas from the European sphere of influence and effectively claimed it (all of it) for the United States. In its 19th century context, the Doctrine sought to protect the self-determination of newly independent countries throughout the hemisphere, with the United States acting as those countries' shepherd, ever-vigilant of the wolves of Europe.

In the 20th century, and especially during the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine gained new life in a new geopolitical context. The United States' new mission was to shepherd North and South America economically, expanding free markets and stamping out communism (ruthlessly) wherever and whenever it sprang up: Chile 1973, Guatemala from 1966 up through the 1970s, Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. Only Cuba managed to stay a red thorn in the U.S.'s side during the Cold War era.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, an emboldened United States sought to further its neo-liberal influence throughout Latin America. The Washington Consensus became the credo of the Western Hemisphere. Through such organs as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. imposed its economic and political influence on the newly revived democratic regimes of Argentina and Brazil. Deregulation and integration into the global capitalist system - headed by the world's now lone superpower - became the key to economic development. More than the key, it was the only option.

After 9-11, the United States began to tend less and less to its backyard, and more toward the Middle East, where 1) radical Islamist terrorists could be hunted down, and 2) where the vast majority of the world's remaining oil supplies could be secured and controlled. In the wake this shift, many a Latin American government moved left. Particularly in South America. Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, and has consolidated his power with evermore vocal anti-Americanism since his first reelection in 2000. Evo Morales took control of Bolivia in 2006, and has since nationalized the country's natural gas reserves and become Chávez's number one ally. Rafael Correa has similarly shifted Ecuador away from free-market policies since assuming the presidency in 2007. Meanwhile, Lula's Brazil, the Argentina of the Kirchner couple, Vázquez' Uruguay, Bachelet's Chile, Alan García's Peru and Fernando Lugo's Paraguay have all adopted policies that blend socialism with neo-liberalism. Only Colombia, under the mandate of the right-leaning Álvaro Uribe, has remained a firm foothold for North American influence in the region, due exclusively to the billions of dollars in military aid the U.S. pumps into Colombia to fight the Marxist FARC guerilla faction, an officially declared terrorist organization.

This so-called "loss of Latin America", for which the Bush Administration has been blamed, has revealed a United States less able to wield its political and economic influence certainly in the region, but throughout the world as well. Brazil, with a steadily growing economy that accounts for roughly two-thirds of the economic output of South America, has gradually wrested control of the region from U.S. hands. The EU-like continental common market MERCOSUL is still in the development stages, but as it grows, dependence on the United States diminishes.

Yet the current financial crisis has proven that Latin America has not yet achieved complete economic independence from the United States (or, as Chávez put it, "uncoupled itself from the wagon of death.") I invite you to read the New York Times article below to better understand how the region is coping with North America's mess:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/world/americas/03latin.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

It's hard not to agree with Lula's analysis. The same deregulation the U.S. has always preached to its neighbors to the south is the same deregulation that led us all down the path to financial mayhem.

In regards to the fall of the Brazilian currency, the real, I'll admit, I'm currently enjoying an exchange rate of 2.30 reais to the dollar. When I arrived back in February it was 1.80 to one. That rate declined to about 1.54 to 1 in late July. As the crisis deepens, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate ballooned even more: just yesterday it was 2.17 to 1, and two days before it was 2.02 to 1. Yet my gain is Brazil's potential loss. Brazil, since colonial times, has depended on the export of commodities such as coffee, sugar, and now soy for economic growth. The IMF's forecast for Brazil in 2008 was growth of around 5%, due in large part to the expected growth in the agricultural export sector. While it is true that a weak real makes Brazilian commodities cheaper and thus more attractive, an overly devalued real would make Brazilian producers reap smaller returns on their investments of previous years when the currency was stronger. To make matters worse, the weak real makes foreign capital that much more expensive, which is further complicated by the fact that frozen global credit markets have little to offer Brazilian Agrobiz even if it did want to invest in more expensive capital.

The bottom line: 5% growth may now be out of reach, and prospect of a prospering and evermore economically independent Brazil may not come about as quickly as many Brazilians had hoped.

As karma would have it, heightened anti-American angst among many of my Brazilian acquaintances has been the price of the exchange rate I currently enjoy. Just when they saw their country almost free from North American economic domination, with prosperity and growing regional power on the horizon, the present crisis threw a wrench in their expectations. More than ever during my stay down here I'm hearing claims that current events are a sign that U.S. world hegemony is all but at an end (here's a good BBC report on just that topic). And now I hear this with an air of "good riddance." It makes being an ambassador of goodwill that much harder, and I'm starting to feel a little more thankful that I only have two months left here.

One thing I do tell people is that, well, if the U.S. does lose its hegemonic status, so what? When you're on top of the mountain, everybody resents you. Everybody is either trying to knock you off, cheering for you to be knocked off, or predicting when exactly you will get knocked off. I can't deny that my tiny vindictive side would love to see carefree Brazil assume that onerous position. It's no enviable position, and quite frankly any prosperity that comes from there isn't worth it. We Americans need to take this crisis as a wakeup call. We are not at the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama boasted shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. History, just as it always has, is only beginning. More than ever we need to realize that we are fallible, we are vulnerable, and we can easily (and perhaps gleefully in the eyes of many around the world) be replaced atop the mountain by a China, India, Russia, Japan, or even Brazil. If we want to have more friends than enemies (or any friends at all) going into the second decade of the millennium, we need to willfully reach down and collaborate with the throng of hands below our perch, not beat them back with a stick. If we're lucky, we can turn that mountain into a plateau, where we can be equal partners with B.R.I.C., Japan, South Korea, Europe, and other powerhouse nations, and where we can work together to pull up other impoverished nations one by one to join us. If not, we'd better get used to the view from the bottom of the mountain, because that's how low we will fall. And fall hard.

Space: The Final Brazilian Frontier

2008-09-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

It’ll be a shock getting behind the wheel for the first time only a few months from now. To get around here in Belo I’ve been walking, taking buses, the metro, or taxis, or getting rides from friends. We’ll have to see if driving a car is “just like riding a bike.” I’ll come home out of practice to say the very least.

There are certainly times I’ve missed having a car here in BH. Just read my last post and you’ll understand why. While I’m all for a greener world—politicians, if you’re listening, the time is now to invest in efficient and clean public transportation, even in sub-100,000-population cities like Iowa City—there is no beating the freedom a car can give us. (Meaning politicians, if you’re listening, the time is now to invest in more fuel-efficient cars and raise CAFE standards well beyond the provisions of 35mpg per fleet by 2020 set by last year’s Energy Independence and Security Act).

Anyway, yes, though it'll mean increasing my carbon footprint, I’ll thoroughly enjoy having my car back. And not only because I won’t have to worry about catching or missing a bus that comes only twice an hour. I’m certainly not going to miss the Brazilian ritual of getting on a bus.

Bus stops in Belo are laid out about every hundred meters or so on main roads throughout the city. Some stops only serve several lines, and sometimes only one line in more remote areas of the city. Others, like most in the heart of downtown, serve 10 to 20 lines. These stops tend to be packed with people. When a desired bus approaches, those who want it to stop stick out their arm to signal it to do so.

The elements in this ritual that are certain: which lines stop at which stops, and how to make the bus stop.

The uncertain element: exactly where the bus will come to a stop, due to a combination of the driver’s speed and the volume of both bus and car traffic around the stop at any given time.

Thus, when worn brakes squelch a bus to a stop, chaos is destined to ensue. Let’s say I, along with 7 other strangers, want to get on bus 9410 at a major downtown stop in order to head back toward Coração Eurcarístico and PUC. The bus stops about 10 feet away from where the 8 of us are huddled in a bunch. From here, it’s survival of the fittest: whoever has the quickest reflexes that start her off toward meeting the bus door by the time the bus stops will more than likely get on first. Behind her the rest of us group up. And it really is group up, not line up. You don’t line up in Brazil to get on a bus. You get in a cluster and anarchically clamber into the door and up the steps. And if you want to assure your place in the cluster, you can’t give up an inch of space. If you do, that’s just a window for another to jump in front of you. Kindergarteners would cry if someone “cut in line” in such a way. Here, that’s not the case.

Just as with time, as I wrote in the post below, you can’t claim that Brazilians don’t have “respect” or “regard” for filling space in an orderly fashion. Order might be on the Brazilian flag, but it's not necessarily in their cultural vocabulary. Or, better, we don't share the same idea of order. Like time, space is a cultural impasse between Brazilians and Gringos. We Gringos like our personal bubbles, and we don’t like it when they’re burst. We march through elementary school hallways in straight lines, and we’re scolded if we jump out or cut in front of someone else. When we line up at a lunch counter or to get on a rollercoaster, we will deride and then shun someone with the nerve to jump ahead of those of us who had been patiently waiting.

The first shall always be first, and the last last in America. And perhaps not just physically speaking…

The orderliness of our persons translates into the orderliness we Gringos practice—generally—on the roads. If someone cuts you off, he’s apt to get a horn and a finger. Lane lines are strictly obeyed. It's illegal for motorcycles to pass between lanes of cars. We may not always come to complete stops at stop signs, but only crazies fling themselves halfway into an intersection before proceeding through or making a turn.

In the end, our behavior in going to great pains to order ourselves amongst ourselves within a given space, be it walking, driving, or riding a motorcycle, is based on our mutual respect for one another’s personal bubble, and on our shared manic fear of anarchy.

In Brazil, that personal bubble lies about a millimeter off the surface of your skin. Men and women great each other with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Both friends and strangers commonly touch you on the arm to emphasize a point their trying to make with you. When I first met my friend Adriano shortly after arriving, I thought that he was gay because of how much he touched my forearm while talking to me. Now that I've become acculturated, I touch him, and other friends, back. Beware friends back home…

Instead of being subconsciously focused entirely on not bursting another’s bubble or wasting time with the formality of lining up for anything, Brazilians are tuned into making efficient use of every last shred of space. That juicy inch in front of me, which I’ve grown up conceding the person just ahead of me, would go to waste if someone just to my left didn’t pounce in to claim it, whether at the bus stop, the copy counter, or the lunch line.

I won’t lie, it’s hard to keep my blood from boiling when this happens, accustomed as I am to my own country’s version of “order and progress.” Two deep breaths and reminding myself about the values of cultural relativism usually do the trick to calm me down. It’s not disrespect I’ve been the victim of. It’s ingenuity. Forming a line immediately before getting on a bus takes twice as long as the Brazilian method. We may actually be too stuffy on this one. The Brazilian way may not be pretty, but it appears to get results.

We're like the Red Coats who quickly learned that they couldn’t fight a war marching in a single-file line, beating drums and blowing bugles, after French and Indians hiding in trees picked them off mercilessly and with ease.

So, when it comes to space, Brazilians may have the edge. But there is one sense of spacial consciousness that I cannot give Brazilians even the slightest bit of cultural relativist sympathy: their practice of filling space vocally. I already wrote about this phenomenon in a previous post.

No other manifestation of my Brazilian culture shock has been so shocking as the impunity with which students converse with one another while a professor or a peer is addressing the class, or when grown adults overtly show that they’d rather not listen to you speak by talking amongst themselves. Professors may hold up a hand and shush the class if the noise gets out of control, but almost always to no avail. Even when one of my most vocal professors screamed over the din of a particular class, pleading for silence, not everyone took her seriously. Some still continued to talk in the back of the room, the so-called fundão. Of what they’re discussing I have no idea; I’m too busy straining my ears to tune into the one channel of Portuguese that actually matters.

Sometimes students will shush their peers when they have an interest in hearing what a prof or another student has to say. But then and only then. These students are just as likely to talk to one another when they don’t have the slightest interest in classroom material.

I am currently taking a course on the political economy of Africa with a professor who is half Greek, half American, yet conducts the course in nearly perfect Portuguese. I gleaned from him that he did his undergrad at Denver University, and so he’s most certainly used to the American classroom behavior of respecting your teachers with silence. If you don’t want to pay attention, you tune out, and the loss is yours alone. You don’t keep fellow students who do give a hoot from enjoying an atmosphere conducive to learning. Hence my empathy for Professor Yeros when he has to clap his hands and scold students a good half-dozen times per class for talking in the back.

Really, that vacuum of silence is to Brazilians students (not all of course, but certainly most, and, as I mentioned above, adults are just as apt to do this) as that inch-wide vacuum of space is for that person next to me wanting to get on the same bus. It has to be filled. Keeping quiet right next to your best friend in the fundão would be a waste of precious talking time. Indeed, life is short, so we should tell the ones we love as soon as we can that we love them. Or that it’s their turn to buy the beer this weekend.

Thus, because this behavior shares cultural roots with the practice of piloting your body around in space, I should probably just accept it as it is. Yet, I can't in all good consciousness do such a thing. I’m sorry, but just because you could do something like talk in the middle of class does not always mean that you should. That’s why we have no smoking signs in certain public areas. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, but don’t pollute my lungs along with yours. You smoke in designated areas. You talk to your friends when class is over. The classroom is meant for learning, and any talking should be directed to that purpose alone.

But then again, what do I know? I'm just a Gringo sem graça.

On Brazilian Time

2008-09-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

There are some things in life that will always keep this planet a house divided.

Many of humanity's thousands of cultural wedges are petty and cause us to simply chide and tease each other: Coke vs. Pepsi, Iowa vs. Iowa State, the chicken vs. the egg. Others lead us to take up arms: pro-life vs. pro-choice, Israel vs. Palestine, Shiite vs Sunni.

And then there are those culturally-constructed hurdles that we can laugh and joke about when we find them in our way, but leave us nonetheless frustrated when we struggle to get over them. They are not so serious as to make us want to kill each other, but there are times when they can make even the most sensitive cultural-relativist harbor an ethnocentric thought or two. In a nutshell, whatever leads to a feeling of culture shock falls under this category.

Between Brazilians and Gringos there are several such barriers that make cultural rapprochement difficult if not virtually impossible. I plan to focus the next several posts on such impediments, starting today with one of the most evident: time.

The snag lies in our respective appraisals of a minute. We manic Americans inflate a minute's value. "Time is money" is the metaphor we live by. We "spend time" with friends. We "budget our time," lest we "waste it," and the most expensive of all minutes to spend or waste is a New York one.

In Brazil, you "passa tempo" (pass time), as if the act of moving from one minute to the next were as natural as breathing, and time itself as abundant as air. Indeed, for those looking for the antidote to the New York minute, Brazil in general, and the state of Bahia in particular, is the place to go. Two years ago when I studied in the city of Salvador (in Bahia) a bunch of us students ordered a round of beers at a bar on an island that our program was spending the weekend at. The entire island had been in a blackout all day (not a rare occurrence we found out), and we begged the server to find us some cold beers, not expecting at all that they would even exist due to the power outage. "Um minuto baiano," he lilted in reply, "Just a Bahian minute." About 10 minutes later we got our beers. And yes, amazingly, they were cold.

Good things come to those who wait. An axiom for cultural reconciliation?

In the U.S., everything starts when we say it starts: classes, work shifts, events, the end of happy hour. (The one exception of course is that bohemian jazz hole in every major city where a gig always starts 30 minutes late or more.) We get marked tardy if we arrive to class so much as 5 minutes late, and now businesses have made computers that will prevent a cubicle-dweller from logging in if she doesn't do it by 8am sharp. Should she get to her desk at 8:05, she'll have to confront her supervisor, who will log her in using a special supervisor's password before writing her up for being late to work.

In Brazil, on the other hand, your 7am class won't start until 7:15 on average, and some professors may not even show up until 7:30. A party doesn't start at 9:00, rather more like 10:00 or 10:15. This extra allotment (whoa, easy there, metaphor!) of time functions as something of a cushion, allowing people to collectively move relaxedly from one place and time to another in healthy accordance with their customary pace, as well as accounting for any unforeseen obstacles that could arise: traffic jams, running into an old friend, etc. This custom is not necessarily a conscious action. Sometimes Brazilians just lose track of time completely. One night I was out with Ricardo and some friends, and by the time midnight rolled around Ricardo turned to me and asked, "Hey Brett, what time is it?" When I told him midnight he was shocked that it wasn't in fact 11:00 as his internal clock had presumed.

Yet Brazilian tempo isn't uniform across the whole fabric of society, and this disparity can lead to conflict. Buses are a good example. A city bus in Belo Horizonte will follow its itinerary to the minute. During the week this isn't that big of an issue; if you miss your 8:10 bus due to an unhurried breakfast, you can still catch another in the next 8 to 15 minutes. On weekends, however, many buses only pass by certain stops once or twice an hour, behooving Brazilians to put a little more pep in their step, which can prove a to be struggle, as I experienced on a Saturday evening a little over a month ago.

Five friends and I had decided to go see a movie downtown (movies also are exempt from adhering to Brazilian time), and the only bus that would take us from near my apartment to the movie theater passed by only once every half hour. Approaching the time when the last bus that would get us to the theater on time was to pass by, my Brazilian friends were still lounging around, watching TV and chatting. I had to play the part of the annoying American: "We're gonna have to leave in 5 minutes," I announced to everyone. Really it was more like 10, but I adjusted accordingly. My friends got up leisurely and declared their need to brush their teeth and go to the bathroom before heading out. One friend casually talked to his brother while brushing his teeth, making the process last almost the entire 5 minutes I had "afforded" him (there's that metaphor again...). Finally walking out the door with what I thought was about a minute to spare before the bus would come - and with a 3 minute walk to the bus stop ahead of us - I seemed to be the only one worried that we would miss the bus and thus miss the movie. As it turned out, the bus arrived about 10 seconds after we did, and to my carefree friends it was as if this stroke of sheer luck was ordained by the natural and proper flow of time. Had we arrived 20 seconds later, it wouldn't have been our fault. "We were just following our natural rhythm; it's the bus company's fault for not offering more buses on a Saturday," my friends would have complained.

One would think that after a little over 7 months living amid this climate I would have grown accustomed to it. I sort of have. Old cultural customs are hard to break. Gringoisms still dominate my identity, preventing full Brazilianization. Take this past weekend for example.

Sunday, September 7th, Brazil celebrated its 186th Independence Day. My friend Adriano and I had planned to meet up downtown in the morning to take in the parade commemorating the holiday. Adriano told me to meet him at 8:30, which, of course, meant something closer to 8:45 or 9:00, said my Brazilianized side. Working backward from 8:45 or 9:00, my Gringo side came up with the following plan: Of the 4 buses that I could take from my neighborhood to downtown, I would have to find out which one stopped a few blocks from my place between 8:15 and 8:30, as the trip would take 30 to 40 minutes depending on the route (there it is again... for us trips take time, for Brazilians they demora (last) time). I consulted a timetable online and found the perfect plan: Bus 4111, stopping at 8:20, 35 minute ride. Brilliant!

In very Gringo fashion I left the apartment that morning at 8:10, giving myself plenty of time (yet again...) just to be sure I didn't miss my bus. It just so happened that as I was walking out of the entrance to my building, I saw the Sunday edition of the Estado de Minas newspaper lying on my neighbor's doorstep, and on the front page was an article about foreigners living in Minas Gerais. My impulsiveness kicked in; I just had to buy a copy and read about how my fellow foreign brethren were faring here. The nearest banco de jornal (kiosks on the street that sell a variety of newspapers and magazines) was about twice as far away as the nearest bus stop, yet it itself was only half a block from the next nearest stop. I calculated on the spot that I had enough time (...) to walk to the kiosk (6 or 7 minutes), pick up a paper, and walk to the nearby stop in time to catch Bus 4111.

By the time I got to the banco my watch read 8:18. I approached the owner of the stand, a short, squat, hunchbacked man with a scrunched face and dark yet graying comb-over, as he was undoing bundles of the day's newspapers: Folha de São Paulo, O Tempo, Super, and of course, "Um Estado de Minas por favor!"

"Um momentinho," came the little man's reply. Or at least that's how I perceived his mumbly , heavier-than-normal Mineiro accent. He proceeded to slowly lift up one bundle after another, read the invoice, comment on something incredulous about it, and arrange the papers on his stacks. I looked at my watch. 8:19. Within a few minutes 4111 would pass by, and although I was within 100 feet of the stop, I wouldn't be able to see the bus until it had continued on its way due to a building blocking my view of the stop. In other words, I wouldn't be able to wait for 1) my little friend to sell me a paper, or 2) the bus to show itself and prompt me to ditch the effort at the last second and run to catch it. I tried to take control of the situation:

"Could you just grab an Estado de Minas for me please? I'm kind of in a hurry to catch my bus."

In Brazil, "hurry" is a dirty word. Using it was a last resort. The little man shot a glance at me, shook his head, shrugged, and said something in completely unintelligible mineirês. Probably something to the effect of, "I'm going as fast as I can, let me do my job, I've been doing this the exact same way for years, you ain't gonna change me, missing the bus is your problem." I looked at my watch again. 8:20. If I bailed now the worst that would happen would be my not having a paper to read on the 40-minute bus ride, a paper that I could always pick up later. If I waited another minute, I risked missing the bus, a good chunk of the parade, and having an even grumpier newspaper stand owner on my hands. I gringoed out, erring on the side of caution. "Obrigado," I said, "I'll stop by later." An unintelligible goodbye shot back as I was already walking away.

Astonishingly, the bus didn't come for another 5 minutes. Thus, I probably could've waited for my paper, but then again, hindsight is 20-20.

Instead of reading about foreigners living in Minas, I used the 40-minute trip (one last metaphor sighting) to reflect on the life of this particular foreigner and what had just happened to him over the course of the last 5 minutes, the last hour, the last 7 months. In the U.S., treating a customer as this newspaper stand owner had treated me would be the first ticket to losing your newspaper stand. Time is money. Asking a customer to wait on you for the sake of routine amounts to wasting time, wasting money. Yet maybe there's something to be said about routine; if routine means following a healthy rhythm of life, and a healthy rhythm of life leads to greater longevity, then perhaps my not receiving my paper that morning was a good thing for reasons greater than that very moment: this man would live longer, he and his friends and family would be happier, as would the friends and family of his friends and family, and so on and so forth. Strange logic? Fuzzy math? Definitely. Such a philosophy is as foreign to us Americans as eating large lunches of meat, rice and beans and taking a sesta (Portuguese for siesta) afterward - we'd be wasting time eating anything more than a sandwich, an apple, a Coke and some chips, which would only keep us from stoically withstanding our 30-minute or hour-long lunch breaks. In Brazil, such cultural behavior may not be good for business, but it preserves the fabric of Brazilian society as well as (and perhaps better than?) our on-demand culture preserves ours.

As for my elaborate plan this morning, it was further proof that any Brazilianization of my Gringo mind was hopeless. While I had adapted to the habits of my hosts, it was that adaptation itself - or rather my particular calculating way of adapting - that kept me from truly being baptized Brazilian. To be perfectly native, I'd have to leave the house at 8:30 and show up at the bus stop with the vague hope that the right bus would soon come. If it didn't, I'd take solace knowing that one would come eventually, and that I'd get there when I got there.

I won't lie, I've missed American efficiency over the last 7 months. Following the like-clockwork rhythm of society, as if you yourself were a sprocket in the works, may seem cold and inhuman, especially after living this long outside of it. Yet that is my home, and I could never be parted from it.

I think we've reached the time when the sterility of pure post-modern cultural relativism has become fruitless and inutile. We can deconstruct a culture and say that it's different from ours because of x, y, and z. But to what end? To simply be satisfied with the knowledge that it's different? Maybe academics can afford that luxury, but the rest of us need to understand that in this ever more connected world there is so much we can not only learn from one another, but allow to change one another for the sake of improving our own societies and strengthening the ties that bind one culture to the next. It would be easy for us Americans to say that Brazilians need to respect the value of a minute if they ever hope to advance economically to our level. I'm not going to deny that that's not true. But what we haughty Americans must also do is respect the Brazilian value of a minute. The efficiency of our society doesn't have to come with a more stressful marking of time, nor the heart disease that follows. Does that mean allowing students to show up late to class should they choose? Not necessarily. If anything, we show up on time for class out of respect more for education than for the sake of being on time. What I believe we can take from the Brazilian concept of time is the ability to laugh and be happy even when efficiency breaks down. When traffic makes us late for work. When it takes us a minute longer than normal to get our morning pick-me-up from our local coffeeshop. We shouldn't get mad at ourselves when finishing the last page of that gripping novel makes us miss our bus and "sets us back" 15 minutes.

Time may indeed be money. But it can be so much more. It can be the key to a happier, healthier life, if used wisely. If used Brazilianly.

Projeto Rondon

2008-08-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

The town of Jeribá is little more than a large cursive ‘T’ on the face of the planet. A main arterial dirt road connects the top of the ‘T’ with Dois de Abril to the east and Palmópolis to the west. The trunk of the ‘T’ is a 15%-or-so grade hill (i.e. pretty darn steep) paved with jagged cobblestones, linking the “center” of Jeribá at the bottom with its school at the top. Even from halfway up, the view from the hill is breathtaking: mile after mile of rolling green mounds, too small to be called mountains, too large to be hills. Further off to the north, a trio of giant odd-shaped rocks juts out to reign over the landscape. In the late afternoon, when the sun gives off its daily hour of rich, soft, indirect light, the view becomes ten times more photogenic.

Just before the 5:30pm Brazilian winter sunset, our band of 16 “Rondonistas” left an afternoon of sex ed classes for adolescents and general health classes for Jeribá’s elderly at the school at the summit and headed downhill toward our modest lodging for the day near the intersection of Jeribá’s ‘T’. The deep azure sky specked with orange and purple clouds hovering over an ever-darkening terrain made us pull out our cameras and capture what would be our last sunset in Jeribá.

What a spectacular view this town is blessed with.

That was my first thought. A strange thought at that for a town that has next to nothing, that sustains itself (barely) through small-time agriculture and exporting workers to the industries of São Paulo or Belo Horizonte. Jeribá isn’t even a town; it, along with its sister Dois de Abril, is a mere district of Palmópolis, a metropolis in microcosm. All political and virtually all of the scant economic power is concentrated in this latter town of 7 or 8 thousand, 10 times larger than satellite Jeribá and 4 times that of Dois de Abril.

As the countryside grew darker, so too did the luster of the view from Jeribá’s hill. My mind drifted to earlier that morning. There, after several hours of fun and games with Jeribá’s kids at the school, 9-year-old Débora, her hair shorn like a boy's to a mere couple of inches because of a bout of head lice, remarked how hungry she was. A fellow Rondonista told her not to worry, she’d be heading home soon for lunch. Débora sadly replied, “But there’s no food at home.” The image of this poor girl walking up Jeribá’s enormous hill on an empty stomach, only to find a school with only so much potential to enrich her mind and classmates only too eager to make fun of her haircut that would be beautiful anywhere else in the world but traditional rural Brazil, made the view from the top of the hill at once turn ugly. What if Jeribaenses never even bothered to spend a few seconds of their day to take in the vista? Who’s to say they didn’t deliberately ignore it, seeing it as a curse, beauty forever mocking their plight? Who were we to suddenly gain the right to appropriate this view in little digital boxes?

How did we get so lucky to be the ones wearing the T-shirts with "Projeto Rondon" written on them, taking views like Jeribá's as a sort of "payment" for our volunteerism?

The Projeto Rondon is named after Brazilian Army Marshall Cândido Rondon, whose life and mission spanned the 19th and 20th centuries. Rondon, of indigenous descent, is renowned for his many explorations of the Brazilian hinterland—including a famous expedition to the Amazon with U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt in 1914—to get to know Brazil’s numerous indigenous tribes and help to integrate them into modern Brazilian society. One of his mottos, used today by the Projeto, was “Integrar para não entregar,” “Integrate, don’t give up.” Give up a people, give up a land, give up the dream of a country united in its forward march marked by order and progress.

The first time university students were sent in Rondon's footsteps to better understand their diverse, continent-sized country was in July of 1967, when 30 such students from Rio were flown by military aircraft to (appropriately) Rondônia, the western Brazilian state named after Rondon whose inhabitants live isolated behind the curtain of the Amazon Rainforest. Further joint university-military missions (keep in mind this was at the height of military rule in Brazil, which lasted from 1964-1985) continued sporadically until the mid-70s, when the Projeto was lost to the ever-changing and always tense political atmosphere of the military state. Further missions of integration would have to be made under other auspices until the Projeto Rondon was officially revived in 2003, the first students intervening in January of 2005 in the town of Tabatinga, located on the border with Colombia in far western Amazonas state.

The present-day Projeto continues Rondon's goal of integrating the far-flung peoples of Brazil. The Projeto's flagship programs are found at the national level, where students from the developed southern and southeastern regions of the country connect with their compatriots in the less developed northeast and north. Teams are made up of students from a range of "majors" (to use American terminology), and through a variety of workshops these teams share their collective knowledge and experience with health, literacy, business, valuing and preserving culture, leadership skills, and much more with targeted communities.

But these communities aren't limited to those hidden in the rainforest a thousand miles away from the sands of Ipanema or the hustle and bustle of the Avenida Paulista. Even within the most well-developed states in Brazil's southern half, dozens of poor, rural municipalities exist far outside the orbit of an industrialized metropolis. Thus the need for the Projeto at the state level.

The first interventions in Minas Gerais embarked in July of 2005 for communities with Human Development Indexes under 0.7. Interventions followed in December of 2005, and July and December of 2006, and this year-and-a-half span saw over 1,800 PUC students, educators and staff members bring the project to 53 Mineiro communities, touching the lives of between 50,000 and 60,000 people per trip. Ventures have continued semi-annually since.

I first found out about the Projeto Rondon at an informal get-together for PUC's international students all the way back in February, where a woman involved in the Projeto's administration gave a short presentation. It took about a month for my piqued interest to turn into action. Feeling that my time on this Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship was lacking a service side to its ambassadorialship, I decided to attend a more detailed informational meeting. Alongside about 500 fellow PUC students, I became sold on the Projeto's mission of bringing integration and solidarity to rural Minas, and the opportunity it offered me to get to see a side of Brazil that I would otherwise never have seen.

After sacrificing 6 of our Saturday afternoons throughout the Brazilian fall semester to prepare for our two weeks as Rondonistas through a series drudging workshops, teams of around 15 students and a coordinator were assembled literally on the eve of departure. For our team of 16, the first few hours on a winding 14-hour bus ride had to suffice for introductions and first impressions before everyone leaned their seats back and tried to catch a few uncomfortable winks. Our team comprised of PUC students from health sciences to social sciences, biology and psychology, engineering and law. The youngest was an 18-year-old freshman, the oldest our coordinator Ana Luísa, a recent PUC grad in psychology and a mere 25. Our destination: Palmópolis, a rural community in the northeast corner of Minas Gerais that was officially established as a municipality in 1992, finally giving its inhabitants, mainly temporarily contracted workers in cattle fields and banana groves, a place on the map. Palmópolis, along with other targeted communities, was chosen for its low HDI score: 0.615. What does that mean? Palmópolis is closer to “less developed” than “highly developed” for a variety of reasons: poor education, lack of basic infrastructure, low GDP per capita, limited access to healthcare, among others.

Ana Luísa had been a Rondonista in Palmópolis before, and after graduating college she lived and worked there for nearly a year. Her experience in Palmópolis, particularly her contacts with those in positions of power, proved invaluable. In a country where mobility is based far more on who you know than what you know, her tireless efforts to talk with just the person who could facilitate our every action made the difference, in my mind, between a successful mission and a potential failure.

Weary from lack of sleep and bruised from every bump of the final three hours of the ride on a dirt road, we nonetheless donned brightly colored costumes and, like a band of traveling minstrels, paraded through the streets of Palmópolis singing, banging drums, and making our presence known. After about an hour, children began to follow us a la the Pied Piper toward the main plaza, at which point songs and games ensued. After a few hours of singing and playing, more tired than at any point so far that day, we headed back to our headquarters, a social services shelter with Spartan facilities, and wrapped up the day with a series of meetings to prepare for the days ahead, as well as “get-to-know-each-other” games that made up for what was lacking in several waking hours on a bus. We ate our first of two weeks’ worth of delicious, home-cooked, natural and organic meals that we’d wolf down ravenously, and then fell asleep together on the same hard, cold, tiled floor almost the very second we laid prostrate on our inch-thick mats.

Days two and three involved walking up and down the sinuous, spaghetti-bowl streets of Palmópolis, knocking on doors and taking surveys of the town’s inhabitants regarding their access to basic utilities and their monthly income. Only a handful, we found, had no electricity. Slightly a few more had no running water, and hardly anyone enjoyed a sanitary sewage system. As for monthly income, the highest recorded was around 3000 reais (~$1800), belonging to a local government minister (the mayor was unavailable for interview—surely his would have broken this mark). The lowest was around 60 reais (~$38), from a widow who cooked the rice and beans bought with this pension check with water from the river, the same river that acted as the local sewer and laundromat.

More than once, the divide between “developed” interviewers and “developing” interviewees became cause for the latter to lash out at us with an indignant “what are you doing here?”, or “we have nothing here, and how are you going to help us out?”. Near the end of each day, our band would meet for an hour to decompress from dozens of interviews, share our perspectives of the town, and tie tighter the bonds we had been continuing to weave together. The evening would be capped off—as would be the case for the remainder of our days as Rondonistas—with a three-hour-long rotation to take a much-coveted shower.

On day 4, a Thursday, our interaction with the people of Palmópolis began in earnest. The morning began with a series of games at the local school: soccer, hopscotch, peteca (an indigenous game played like badminton, only you use your hands, see photo at left), and, an American classic, tossing around a Frisbee. In one of the last games, played mainly with smaller children, the de facto motto of our intervention was born: “Todo mundo ganhou!” “Everybody wins!”

Our hope with the morning of games was to rile the kids of Palmópolis up enough so that they’d be somewhat calm for more serious activities in the afternoon: talks about familial relations and storytelling and literacy activities. Not to be. The same kids from the morning were twice as rambunctious, chasing each other and climbing trees and distracting those few who wanted to participate. From American eyes, it suddenly became easy to see where lay the roots of a society that has minimal respect for law and where discipline is toothless. Meanwhile, a second contingent of our team was working with Palmópolis’ elderly on how to properly exercise in their twilight years. In our meeting later that evening the discussions generated by both halves of the team revealed yet another divide taking place all over Brazilian society—really, all over the world: the age divide. Kids solely seeking new and better means for stimulation have no patience for the repositories of wisdom, traditions and values, stories of a hard yet glory-filled past. What would the wild and crazy kids from today’s activities have to tell their grandkids 60 years from now? How they ran around and hit each other, then went home and watched cartoons?

The morning of day 5 introduced us to a group of kids in whom seeds of tradition were being carefully planted. Our planned activity for the morning was to show a film for the kids of Palmópolis, with the objectives being to 1) pull kids off the streets, and 2) give less fortunate children the opportunity to see a movie they may never have the chance to see. The movie: The Incredibles. The locale: Palmópolis’ Casa da Cultura, the House of Culture. There, along with a handful of kids we had coaxed from kicking dirt in the street, we bore witness to one of the bright spots of the town: the children’s Afro-Dance and Capoeira (a Brazilian martial art) class. We let the class continue for an hour or so, about half its normal time, and even participated in some of the dance steps and percussion. At the end of the class, after the 20 or so kids had gracefully flowed through dance after dance, the three teachers had the chorus of students shout out the class rules:

1. Respect your teachers
2. Respect your classmates
3. Don’t fight
4. Don’t skip class
5. Respect all the mestres (Capoeira masters) that came before you

I wonder if one of these kids will grow up to write the book "Everything I Every Need to Know, I Learned in Afro-Dance Class."

The class went to wash up, and then came back and sat down to watch the movie. The transition seemed all too strange. Don’t get me wrong, The Incredibles is a fantastic movie, and I do believe showing it had the potential to expand the budding imaginations of all the kids in that room. But to cut into a class that taught these kids the values of their own cultural heritage, only to show them a film that had nothing to do with their lives, that didn’t teach them order and respect, it seemed terribly out of place. Marx would call it alienation of one culture by another. I’m no Marxist, but I’d have to agree with him on this one.

Day 5 ended with a raucous meeting of the youth of Palmópolis, in which Rondonistas and local teenagers worked together to diagnose the ills of the town, as well as prescribe solutions. The atmosphere was electric with hope for real change and a future generation of concerned leaders. The question was, how long would the charge last?

After the meeting, our spirits dampened with some tragic local news that we received from Ana Luísa: a mother of twin infants had committed suicide after discovering that her lover and the father of her children had a mistress. The hardships of daily life being a poor mother in rural Brazil became that much more hard for her to bear. What this meant for our intervention was that the carnival we had planned for the following afternoon for the children of Palmópolis would have to be postponed for the following Saturday. Really, all we could do in the wake of this tragedy to not disturb an already tense and troubled population was spend some much needed R&R.

We slept in a few extra hours Saturday morning before ultimately heading out together to the weekly market near the edge of town, where we perused cheap clothes and plastic knick-knacks from Paraguay, fresh spices, and even fresher cuts of raw meat left exposed to the elements.

That afternoon, we hiked for a few miles outside of Palmópolis along the lone dirt highway toward one of the more beautiful (and less polluted) waterfalls in the area for a picnic lunch. The hour trek was a display of the harshness of rural Brazilian geography: a merciless sun, interminable rolling hills, acidic red-clay soil. And yet the emerald green that such a land could still produce was mesmerizing.

We arrived at the waterfall, cracked open a couple 2-liters of Coke, and devoured ham and cheese sandwiches to refuel from the hike before taking a hoard of pictures and dipping our feet in the icy flowing waters of the cachoeira (waterfall in Portuguese). In a country where eco-tourism is fast becoming a lucrative business, I couldn’t help but think of this cachoeira one day opening up a tiny stream of income for Palmópolis that could then continue to grow. One day. A day when people had reason to come to the area for other than humanitarian motives. When bureaucracy and corruption stepped aside and finally let basic infrastructure be built in Palmópolis. When the town’s youth finally received the education that could give them the mobility to make something of themselves, coupled with a reason and a will to then return and prevent a paralytic brain drain. Such a mound of goals seemed Sisyphean. But if we weren’t there for even our too-short two-week stint, Palmópolis’ boulder would never get its first push up the hill.

Sunday came and offered us another day of rest, though we used most of it to prepare for a solid second week of intervention, as well as write and present the final chapter of our radio soap opera “Chamas na Bananeira,” “Flames in the Banana Grove,” which we had been broadcasting on the local FM channel for the last few nights. The radionovela told the story of Zé Bananeira, an alcoholic and abusive husband stuck in his traditional machista ways; his neglected elderly mother; his passive yet dignified wife; the couple’s hard-working son looking to get into college; and their young daughter who falls in love with Gringo Zezinho Lima-Lemon (me), who may or may not be the father of her unborn child. With our script—always written at the very last minute—in hand, we’d run to the radio with hopes of giving the people of Palmópolis a half-hour of comic relief, life up their values, and share a pinch of education to spice up the end of their workday.

Sunday also gave us the opportunity to use three of the few computers in town with Internet. Even before checking email I opened up BBC News’ site. In the last week, Iran hadn’t bombed us, we hadn’t bombed Iran, Barack Obama hadn’t been assassinated, John McCain hadn’t died of a heart attack, and overall the world hadn’t come to an end. In Palmópolis, it certainly could have and we wouldn’t have realized it for some time.

Monday morning we loaded into a minibus and endured the bumpy hour-long ride to Dois de Abril. There, job one was administering the survey once again. Do you have water? Electricity? A bathroom? One half-toothless woman with six kids answered this last one thus: “We got a shitter in back, but it ain’t nuthin proper, no.” Not exactly the Portuguese you learn in the classroom. Not exactly the Brazil you see in postcards.

Afterward we divided our remaining day-and-a-half in Dois de Abril into two-hour blocks, broke up into our spontaneous teams, and gave workshops on basic health and hygiene, sex ed, self esteem for women and the elderly, environmental ed. In the latter I got to share with the kids of Dois de Abril one of the greatest works of one of the greatest of American poets: “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein. In a less light-hearted yet equally troubling story, a young girl in the sex ed class told of three friends, aged 15, 16, and 17, who had all gotten pregnant from three brothers all over the age of 30. The three “men” all got the hell out of Dodge when they learned they’d all be dads. In a week that had been free of all political discussion, I raised the issue of whether abortion should be legalized in Brazil to protect uneducated young women such as these three from becoming mothers before their time, or from dangerous illegal abortion operations, which one of the girls informed she had already had. I equated their case as something closer to rape than consensual relations. From even some of my more liberal female team-members, I was met with resistance.

We closed our two days in Dois de Abril with a small play on the importance of preserving the environment, a few last games and songs with the kids, and a bevy of photos of Rondonistas with said kids. It was a rehearsal for a greater and more difficult goodbye to come.

We left for Jeribá at 7:00 the next morning by public bus. Halfway between the two towns, the 30-year-old diesel-belching bus stopped in the serene morning mist to let half-a-dozen men get off and commemorate another day of work under a tympanic sun, surrounded by green shrubs and red earth. We continued on. We reached Jeribá. We climbed up and down its hill several times. We put on our play again, said our goodbyes all too soon, packed up and returned to Palmópolis in an even older bus. We ate. We showered. We slept.

We never had the chance to put on our play in Palmópolis. The Rondon mother ship called us from Belo Horizonte late on our last Friday to inform us that the bus that we thought would be taking us back home early Sunday morning would in fact be there and set to leave before midnight Saturday. More than any previous day, we realized that every last second and every last drop of our energy and will would have to be squeezed out of us on our last, packed day. Our postponed carnival went off with the mirth that was absent from a Saturday prior. Then, after a lightning-fast turnaround, we returned to the main plaza for what was originally planned to be a relaxed closing ceremony for our intervention. With us having to be on board our bus by 11pm, an evening in which Palmópolis elderly, its church youth groups, and its Afro-Dance and Capoeira classes all had an opportunity to show us their stuff, all while we said our goodbyes to the dozens of Palmopolenses great and small that had touched our hearts, turned into a frenetic and slightly awkward event. Our last hours as Rondonistas were thus rushed beyond the threshold of Brazilian comfort. But, as the classic cliché would have it, all good things must come to an end, and perhaps this end had to be rushed for the two Brazils of Rondon to take their places back in reality, albeit a reality now imbued with the memories of each other, and the realization of their shared destiny.

And as for me…
...I left Palmópolis knowing that I had just completed the greatest challenge of my life. There are few feelings greater than sitting in a bus or train or plane traveling back home (wherever home may be at any given time), looking out the window and thinking simply, "I did it." Your flesh and bones are weary, but your spirit is stronger than ever before. You've got a rucksack full of laundry to do, hundreds of pictures to edit and catalog, and ten times more memories that are already at work reordering the fabric of your mind. Where you go next after some much needed time at home is for tomorrow to tell, as are what parts of here and now you will bring to there and then. You know there's a story to tell. The words still need time to incubate. More than anything, when you look out that window and see that slight reflection of your face flying by mile after mile, you realize how in transition your life really is. Whether or not you believe that the experiences you accumulate one after another are progressively linked by divinely defined destiny, a purpose greater than yourself that the vessel of your body is driven to fulfill, quite honestly doesn't really matter; this is a question that belongs to the sanctity of the faith that each and every one of us has. What we can all agree on is that with each passing challenge, from our first day at school to our first day in a forgotten Brazilian world, we do grow, we do become better human beings, we do see the world that much more clearly. Like the view from the top of a big hill. Maybe not too unlike the hill in Jeribá.

Para todos os meus colegas rondonistas de Palmópolis de julho, 2008.
Amo vocês com todo meu coração.
Obrigado pelas memórias que nunca vou esquecer.

All (Brazilian) Politics Is Local

2008-08-23T05:19:00.000-07:00

In typical Brazilian fashion, the debate started at 7:30pm instead of 7:00, though we were happy to have gotten to PUC’s auditorium by 6:55 and been spared from having to squat in the aisles or crowding in the back near the exits.

Is it really any wonder there’s no adherence to fire codes in Brazil?

Ricardo and I found seats near the front right of the auditorium. For a half-hour we watched photographers and TV cameramen get in position to immortalize the Belo Horizonte mayoral debate that was about to take place. As the seats filled up, foot soldiers (“militantes”) pushed pamphlets and platforms of their respective candidate from the 8 parties represented in the debate. By 7:29 we had collected a dozen new brightly colored leaflets to add to our collection in the drawer below our TV that had been growing steadily in the last few weeks as the campaigns for the October 5th vote started to pick up speed.

And then, in the name of progress, order was called for by PUC’s student body president. He and a gray-haired local journalist—who a generation ago was likely taking part in a different kind of manifestation of political culture in a different kind of political climate—laid down the rules they would follow to moderate the debate. Each of the 8 candidates would have 2 minutes to introduce him or herself and his or her campaign. Next, 2 journalists from local newspapers would ask a question for 4 of the candidates to answer in 2 minutes each. In part three, volunteers would draw the names of 2 students from a box placed in front of each candidate, and these lucky 16 would ask a question of their chosen candidate, who would, again, have 2 minutes to answer each question. The debate would then wrap up with a (wait for it…) 2-minute closing statement from each candidate.

While it was at first a shock, after 6+ months living with virtually no reverence for time, to see the giant timer projected behind the stage counting down each 2-minute segment, I was glad to see it. If it weren’t there, the longwinded-squared nature of these 8 being both Brazilian and politicians would have taken the debate into the next morning.

The 8 candidates represented the following parties:

PDT: Partido Democrático Trabalhista, Democratic Labor Party
PCO: Partido da Causa Operária, Workers’ Cause Party
PMDB: Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, Brazilian Democratic Movement Party
PRTB: Partido Renovador Trabalhista Brasileiro, Brazilian Labor Renewal Party
PSB: Partido Socialista Brasileiro, Brazilian Socialist Party
PCdoB: Partido Comunista do Brasil, Communist Party of Brazil
PSTU: Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado, Unified Socialist Workers’ Party
DEM: Democratas, Democrats

According to the greatest of all references, Wikipedia (see article), there are 27 "official" political parties in Brazil. Of these 27, Wikipedia classifies 6 as “major”: PDT, PMDB, DEM, along with PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, Labor Party), PSDB (Partido Social Democrático Brasileiro, Brazilian Social Democratic Party), and PP (Partido Progressivo, Progressive Party). (PT, PMDB, and PSDB are the juggernaut parties nationally, with PP, DEM, and PDT a tier behind and more influential at the state level). Left to right on the political spectrum, these 6 go like this:

PDT – PT – PMDB – PSDB – DEM – PP

Of Wikipedia’s 6 “medium level” parties (which I won’t bother listing), the PCdoB and PSB supported candidates for the debate, while the PCO, PRTB, PCB, and PSTU represented the 15 “minor parties” in Brazilian politics at the debate.

I should note how municipal campaigns work down here.

First, there are the mayoral candidates themselves, affiliated with a particular party.

Piece of cake.

Beneath them are candidates for a given number of seats as vereadores, something along the lines of city councilors, who, if elected, will be in charge of drafting policies for a particular area of government (i.e. health, education, transportation, etc.). Each candidate for vereador affiliates him or herself with a particular party. All vereador candidates in one party share party resources for publicity (TV ads, cartels, leaflets, bumper-stickers, etc.), yet all compete against each other as well as against candidates from other parties.

Some parties, usually small ones having no candidate for mayor themselves, will form alliances among themselves and with larger parties supporting a candidate. In such a symbiotic alliance, the larger party’s mayoral candidate will ideally gain the votes of the rank-and-file of smaller parties, and the candidates for vereador from small parties will have a more “name brand” candidate to latch onto in their quest for a piece of power.

I should probably take a step back and answer the obvious question: why all the parties?

At the municipal level, and when voting for Brazil’s equivalent of congressmen and women at the national stage, Brazil’s electoral system is proportional. Extremely so. In 2006, for instance, winning 0.3% of the vote got some parties at least 1 seat in Brazil’s equivalent of the House of Representatives. Thus, there’s plenty of incentive for small parties to get out there and try their hand at government. At the gubernatorial and presidential levels, a candidate wins by an absolute majority, giving the country’s major parties an edge (like in France, a run-off is held between the top two first-round finishers if there is no absolute victor). Current President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula” for short) is from PT.

What are the consequences of Brazil’s hyper-proportional system that makes even Israeli politics look exclusivist?

First, obviously, there’s division, most especially on the left. Historically, this is nothing new; divergence in the leftist camp starts at the roots, with discrepancies among Lenin, Trotsky, Tito, Stalin, and Mao and their interpretations of Marxist thought, not to mention the differences between all those who have tried to follow in these giants' footsteps. Alliances must thus be made to avert the complete fracturing of the Brazilian left, though these alliances aren’t guaranteed to last from one election to another and will change with the variable winds of politics. Alliances also must be formed in Congress to assure that bills get passed by simple majority. In such a climate of mutual back-scratching, gridlock and spectral antagonism tend to be less prevalent than strictly two-party systems such as our own. A definite plus in my book. On the negative side, an interesting analysis would be to see whether within these multiple points of political bargaining exists the roots of Brazil's rampant culture of political corruption.

Another plus for Brazil's proportional system: direct participation in politics becomes more active, with more people fighting for the votes of an ever more pluralist electorate. One could maybe argue that a proportional electoral system leads to an increase in voter participation, as there exists a greater probability that a given party’s platform will match a voter’s beliefs, giving her greater incentive to vote. In Brazil, however, that argument is a moot point, as voting is compulsory.

In sum, Brazil’s electoral system is a far cry from our own, where two giant heavyweights duke it out at every level of politics for a majority of votes. Personally, while I wouldn’t favor a system in which I’d have to argue why the American Democratic Party is better than the Democratic Party of America, a little variety in our Redemopublicratican reality would be refreshing. Right Greens? Libertarians?

All right, back to the debate. Each candidate carefully carved out 2 minutes worth of thanking student government, introducing him or herself, and towing the party line through well-tuned sound bites, which received a din of cheers, boos, and the occasional chant or two. Then came the journalists’ questions, one having to do with BH’s health services, the other about which aspects of the present city administration should change and which should remain the same. As good politicians do, each spun the questions to his or her liking.

Then the fun started.

It’s no secret that young people the world over, especially college students, tend toward the gauche of the political spectrum. This is perhaps more true in Brazil than anywhere else on the planet. Che Guevara, maybe the only Argentine a Brazilian ever liked, is more than a pop culture icon in Brazil; he’s a god. Dependence Theory—the Marxist school of thought that blames Brazil’s economic backwardness on an omnipresent, unscrupulous, capitalist, imperialist metropolis, be it Portugal, Britain, or the U.S.A.—has been the mode in Brazilian economic thought since then economist and future President Fernando Henrique Cardoso first penned it in the 1960s. College professors, who a generation ago were revolutionary youth mixed up in the chaff of military repression, have resurged to breathe new life into their leftist ideals in classrooms nationwide.

But perhaps the one element that catalyzes the formation of Brazilian youth’s political ideology (and this is a half-baked hypothesis, mind you) is Brazil’s bacchanal bar culture. At even (perhaps especially) the most hole-in-the-wall bars, hedonism flows by the liter, spreads with each random kiss, and gives Brazilians of all ages—but especially college students—a no-stress identity that they would never trade in even to become the world’s wealthiest nation. Brazil’s botecos have become the coffeehouses of Voltaire’s France, where revolutionary fraternité grows with every reason to drink to the end of the self-righteous, stuffy, and moralistic hegemony of the United States.

So, one by one, names were drawn and students rose and addressed each candidate in front of their peers in a room full of revolutionary iconographic T-shirts and dreadlocks. The questions were politically savvy, having to do with how candidates would work for social integration, more organized public transportation, free or reduced bus fares for students, greater environmental stewardship, and better healthcare for BH, among other things. Order was broken once when an elderly woman in the back of the audience cried out for the interests of her demographic not to be forgotten. The moderators gave her the floor for the standard 2 minutes, allowed a couple of the candidates a short response, and then continued through the scheduled format. With each question, candidates did their best to give a general yet satisfying analysis of the issues, sketch out a few specific solutions, and throw out phrases to rile the demographically and ideologically biased audience into a frenzy: “Free bus fares for all students!” “More investment in public education!” The firebrand candidate for the PCO went off on a tirade against the oppression of the Catholic Church in keeping abortion illegal in Brazil, and somehow managed to connect that with a jab at American imperialism, which would have probably won a greater reaction from this crowd had it been better timed and the candidate running for a position higher than mayor of Brazil’s 3rd largest city.

By 10 o’clock, Ricardo and I both decided we’d had enough and decided to leave before the closing statements. We weren’t alone; the tired crowd had already begun to dwindle, and we followed others out the door like fans at a lopsided basketball game. On the way out, we a caught a glimpse of an anarchist’s half-hearted handiwork: a graphically designed sign that read “Question all authority” beneath a grouping of blank white faces in suits, and a handmade one that said simply “Não vote, fume!” “Don’t vote, smoke!”

As we approached the campus exit, we saw we’d have to run the gauntlet through a half-dozen or so foot soldiers aiming to get rid of their 2-inch thick stacks of leaflets. One girl gave Ricardo not one but three such political trading cards of a particular candidate for vereador. The ever quick-witted Ricardo shot back, “Are you promoting the guy, or the cards?” Perhaps his quip was unjust; she may truly have sympathized with the candidate and his policies. But when you see people daily in front of PUC handing out leaflets for this restaurant, that English school, or another transport service, and when smalltime politicians like vereadores project themselves as products to be bought, with unique names like Antônio Cowboy and Amigão and catchy TV jingles to win votes, you have to wonder if he indeed had a point.

Rio

2008-07-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

Imagine if New Yorkers had world-renowned beaches just a few neighborhoods away from downtown Manhattan. They would be that much more chauvinistic of their city that never sleeps. They would be, in effect, Cariocas. While São Paulo is most often compared to the Big Apple (both are each country’s biggest metropolis, both account for a healthy share of each country’s economy), Rio, with its many comparisons to San Francisco (its European feel, its trolley cars, its large gay population), may indeed be best considered the “Big Pineapple” of Brazil. This simply by virtue of its people: chauvinistic to the point of jingoism, and with a jeito malandro (a New York swagger, if you will) all their own that sustains their identity with their hard-knock city.

As for Minas, many of my Mineiro friends have proudly claimed their state to be the Texas of Brazil. It’s one of the biggest states in Brazil, it prides itself on its traditionalism, and the virile image of the tropeiro (responsible for seeing goods in and out of Minas on treacherous 18th and 19th century roads) parallels that of the Texas cowboy. The biggest difference that sticks out between Minas and Texas is that the latter has a coast. The Gulf of Mexico may not be the crystalline blue waters of the open Atlantic, but it gives Texas a coast nonetheless. Landlocked Mineiros claim that that’s the only thing keeping Minas from being the perfect state; it already has mountains, forests, and a heart as big as, well, Minas.

(There’s a saying in Minas that goes: “Já que Minas não tem mar, eu vou pro bar” – “Since Minas has no sea, I’m going to the bar.”)

In the absence of ocean, neighboring Espírito Santo state has become somewhat of a colony of Minas, with the small beach town Guarapari attracting the most Mineiros to its sands. My roommate, Ricardo, is a Capixaba (an indigenous word used to refer to inhabitants of Espírito Santo), and he says it’s easy to spot Mineiros on the shores of his state: they’re the ones ripping off their outer-garments and running and screaming in an ecstatic frenzy into the waters they’ve been so deprived of.

Mineiros with a bit more money will head to the white sand beaches and glass-colored icy lagoons of aptly named Cabo Frio (“Cold Cape”) on the far eastern tip of the state of Rio de Janeiro. There, Antarctic waters cool off a mix of Mineiros, Cariocas, and Capixabas, slow-cooked under Brazil’s ferocious summer sun.

Only the wealthy and brave among Mineiros opt to prop up their beach umbrellas and sip on Skols or Caipirinhas on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro the city.

The names Copacabana and Ipanema are well ingrained in every Brazilian’s mind, and many an American’s as well. Ipanema conjures up images crafted by Tom Jobim in the immortal Bossa Nova standard “The Girl from Ipanema,” while Copacabana gets catalogued in our minds under the same tropical paradise category as Cancún. Perhaps that’s why you’re likely to find more Gringos than Mineiros among all the Cariocas on these and other (Leblon, Barra, Praia Vermelha) world famous beaches of Rio.

Really, when we Americans think of Brazil, we think Rio. The name Rio stirs up visions of Latin sensuality, of beaches full of beautiful women in skimpy bikinis, and muscular surfer/soccer-player guys with equally revealing sungas (what Brazilians call Speedos). We more than half-expect samba music to be playing naturally in the air, and sex on the beach to be more than just a drink in Rio. What we don’t expect, and why it takes a brave Mineiro to get their beach-fix in Rio, is the “Jeito Carioca,” a Carioca’s will to make ripping off tourists their livelihood.

Recently the weekly TV show CQC, the Brazilian equivalent of “The Daily Show”, aired a special report about the honesty of cab drivers in Rio. One reporter took a taxi from one point of the city to another, chatted with the cabby, spoke in a Carioca accent, and overall made it obvious that he was a local. His fare came to around 12 reais. Another reporter got in another cab, took the same route, spoke in broken Portuguese to fake being a foreigner, and ended up with a fare of 60 reais. When a third reporter came up to the second cab driver and asked him if he thought Brazilians were “an honest people,” the driver emphatically said yes. When the reporter then confronted him with the stunt they had just pulled on him, the cabby sped off without so much as a word.

In my recent trip to Rio with a couple of friends, we were lucky to not run into anything near the second cab driver. The worst we encountered was a cabby who pilfered us for 2 more reais on our fare by pointing to his confusing “Fare Chart” that all of Rio’s taxi drivers keep on their dashboards, which they’ll expect naïve tourists to take it as Gospel when they use it as “proof” that their fare is more than what the meter says. In a not-so-ambassadorial moment, I gave that particular driver his 2 reais, told him where he could stick his chart, and slammed the door, hopefully giving him the hint that his tricks won’t work on every tourist, though it's not very likely. His antics likely came because the trip was a short one, and I didn’t get the chance to make small talk with him. With every other cab the three of us got into, I made it a point to talk with the driver, catching him (or the occasional her) off guard with my nearly perfect Portuguese. By the end of the route, there was no way he/she could rip me off after such a pleasant conversation, or witnessing the miracle of an American that actually spoke his/her language.

Aside from the Jeito Carioca, Mineiros have a better sense than the average naïve American tourist about the dangers that lurk in Rio’s shadows. Such films as City of God, Bus 174, and the recent smash hit Tropa de Elite (which, if it ever comes out in the U.S.—doubtful because Brazilians were outraged that it got snubbed at the Oscars after winning several top awards at other international film festivals—will be called Elite Squad) are all a Mineiro needs to see to know that Rio isn’t Minas, just like New York isn’t Texas. The first and third films are based on true stories, while the second uses media footage of an actual bus hijacking in 2000. Yes, unfortunately, there’s no denying that Rio is notorious for its high crime rate. I’m happy to say, though, that by acknowledging this sad truth I have ceased to be an average naïve American tourist, and have instead become more of a Mineiro. A brave Mineiro. Brave, but not foolish. Rio loses some of its teeth when you know where you can walk and when, and who you can trust and how. But it can still bite, so it’s important to never let your guard down. (I guess what I’m trying to say is, Chuck, after I’ve likely scared the crap out of you with this post, I can honestly say your daughter is safer with no better American than me for the two days she’ll be in Rio).

So what did this brave Mineiro-American do with his two amazing friends and travel-buddies Pamela and Andy during his 10 days in Carioca-land? Everything, and then some.

I got in on a late Friday afternoon to our hotel for the week+, Margarida’s Pousada, a cozy guesthouse nestled in the heart of Ipanema. I arrived to find Margarida, herself, screaming into the telephone at the cable company for taking away her international cable while she was recently away in the U.S. visiting her newborn grandson. While at first afraid that I had booked us in a hotel run by a grouchy old lady, Margarida, a grandmotherly and lovingly dry Portuguese woman in her 70s, turned a warm smile to me as soon as she hung up the phone and led me to our room. Indeed, her demeanor proved to be the opposite of the malicious malandragem of the Jeito Carioca; as Pamela said, she turned Rio into “Margarida-ville.” Every morning she would make us eggs for breakfast, everyday she would let us use her phone to call cabs or points of interest, every evening she would offer to make us a cup of tea if we needed one, which we did for 4 of the first five days. Saturday’s marvelous day-at-the-beach weather turned into rain, wind and cold from Sunday through Wednesday, making us feel more in a Cape Cod fall than a Rio of any season. Yet with Margarida’s cheer, eggs, phone, and tea, we made the most of what could’ve turned into a miserable first half to our holiday.

Sunday saw us prepared to drown our sorrows in a mix of rain and beer. We hit about three bars in the afternoon before capping off the night with creamy draughts and a giant helping of Portuguese- style beef stew at Jobi, a local dive infiltrated every now and then by savvy tourists like ourselves. Over our Monday morning eggs, we vowed not to spend another day as woeful barflies, and decided, perhaps a bit brashly, to devote most of the day wandering the trails of the Tijuca National Forest. Tijuca is the largest urban nature reserve in the world, in which ancient Atlantic Forest has been left in pristine condition, save the trails and roads. The day proved even rainier than Sunday, but the canopy kept us somewhat protected, and what misery the rain sent our way we took in a perpetual state of denial, telling ourselves over and over again that it’s only natural it should be raining in a rainforest. After I got us lost on a trail that would’ve taken us to see some caves, we backtracked to find the road, which we took to the forest’s lone restaurant to eat a lunch of delicious steak sandwiches. On what should’ve been an easy trek back to the entrance of the park, I managed to get us lost again on a trail that, to my credit, did not follow the plan of the map we got at the visitors center. Again, the road became our saving grace; we followed it to the Ranger’s station to call a cab to take us back to Ipanema and civilization. That night, after hot showers to wash the forest from our memory, we went and saw the second Incredible Hulk movie at a posh theatre in Leblon’s one-year-old glistening castle of a shopping mall. While the acting was terrible (Liv Tylor and Ed Norton had ironically no chemistry together whatsoever for playing bio-chemists), the first half-hour of the movie was exciting, filmed on-site in Rio’s Rocinha favela, the largest in Brazil, and indeed the perfect place for Bruce Banner to hide from the U.S. Government. It was especially exciting for me, thinking that Americans would see this movie back home and realize after the first few minutes that—at the very least—Brazilians do not speak Spanish.

Tuesday’s rain led us again to seek non-beach-related Rio activities—no easy feat. We opted, after seeing Rocinha on film, to see the real thing. With a reputable guide, of course. We booked a three-hour tour with the Lonely Planet-recommended Favelatour, an organization that takes tourists to see “the other side of Rio.” The three of us, along with two Brits, two Irish girls, and two Turks, were shown a school in the smaller Canoas favela before being led on a tour through its winding stairs and walkways between the trademark agglomerations of small and colorful brick houses, stacked three or four high. Masses of electrical wires clung like black cobwebs to utility poles. An electrical engineer’s nightmare. Amid the black tangles, blue wires were easily identifiable: broadband. Certainly, no two favelas are alike, but this clued us in that while the other side of Rio may be poor, it’s not completely miserable. After Canoas the tour took us to Rocinha, the mother of all favelas. As we took its one winding road from the bottom to the top of the bairro—a road that used to be part of a Formula One racetrack—we saw shops, national banks, and even a Bob’s Burger restaurant, a national fastfood chain. From the top, we caught a spectacular view of Rocinha juxtaposed with its affluent neighbor, São Conrado. In a world where a curtain is often drawn between the many divisions between rich and poor, at the top of Rocinha, perhaps more than anywhere else in Brazil—or the world—that curtain has been flung wide open.

Wednesday’s rain took us to Centro, Rio’s financial and historical headquarters. The first stop was the Metropolitan Cathedral, an alien-looking modern cone structure with a capacity for 20,000 worshippers. After a walk through Centro’s pedestrian market, bustling even in a downpour, we had a taxi take us to the Escadaria Salerón, Rio’s famous brightly colored tiled steps in historic Santa Teresa. Upon returning to Ipanema, we noticed the clouds starting to break just a little, and so Andy and I decided to take a photographic safari of Ipanema beach. While devoid of the throngs of Cariocas and tourists of Saturday, we caught a spirited soccer game on the sand right before yet another front came in and blew the last few shreds of blue sky away.

That night, we held our breath, hoping that we’d be awoken by the sun piercing through our window blinds.

It did. God must indeed be Brazilian. Thursday became a day of catching up for lost weather. We had met a lovely Australian couple at our pousada the day before, and they invited us to go hang-gliding with them that morning. Rio was to be their penultimate stop before a week in Spain and then finally a new life in London (the penultimate of an 8-month series of stops together through Latin America, which included, among other things, a 30-hour bus ride from Bolivia into Brazil), and they, Al and Lara, were looking to do something crazy. We couldn’t pass up the chance to do it with them. The company we booked, Just Fly, took us to the top of a mountain overlooking São Conrado. You couldn’t help but notice Rocinha’s presence just nextdoor, nor subsequently not feel lucky to be on this one of the two mountains. After a quick (frightfully quick), dare I say “crash course” in how to run off a cliff strapped to a glider (“look to the horizon and don’t stop running”), my tandem pilot and I were the first to take off. The feeling of soaring above the forest, the city, the beach, rising and falling with the change in gusts, hearing the wind fly past your ears in a low whistle, is indescribable. If anything, it makes you wish humans had been born with wings. After about a 10-minute flight, we landed on São Conrado beach in what my pilot later told me was bad wind shear. I watched Andy do the same, and then we both waited for over an hour for Pamela, Al, and Lara to make their descent, watching as glider after glider (and one parasail) came down before them. We later learned that the landing area had been red-flagged for poor wind conditions right after Andy’s flight, leading the reputable Just Fly to not take any chances. Meanwhile (and this is malandragem Carioca at its best) the gliders that did come down were rogue companies that disobeyed wind conditions, taking tourists on flights for a fraction of what we paid. While it cost more, I much preferred the route we took. The trio finally came down, we were dropped off back at the hotel, then after some time apart off doing our separate things, the three Americans and the two Aussies met again by chance on top of one of the new Seven Wonders of the World, the Christ the Redeemer statue. Up there, you’re surrounded by postcard views. We watched the sunset at Jesus’ feet, took a cab back to Ipanema, and then went out to dinner and a few drinks—which, as so often can happen, turned into a few drinks until 5am. We figured after the gloomy first half of the trip, we deserved every minute of our first dry day.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, each dryer, sunnier, and warmer than the other, were spent predominantly at the beach, mostly Ipanema, but also the larger, dirtier, and more touristy Copacabana. Drunk with sun, we ended our holiday in Rio with a soccer match at the Mecca of the sport, Maracanã Stadium, between local rivals Fluminense and Botafogo. The game itself was ugly, played almost exclusively between each teams’ reserves as Fluminense was playing in the Copa Libertadores (the premier Latin American championship) final that following Wednesday (which they ended up losing to LDU of Ecuador on PKs). Still, the experience of being there—in kick-ass seats that we scored from talking to the right security guard—watching soccer where soccer gained its soul, under the left arm of Christ the Redeemer, was the greatest way we could’ve ended the trip.

The next morning we said our goodbyes to Margarida, I saw Andy and Pamela off at the airport as they set off for their next leg of their whirlwind tour of South America in Buenos Aires, and I hopped on a non-air-conditioned bus that sped on the curvy “highway” back to Belo Horizonte.

After waking up in my "own bed" Tuesday morning, and breakfast without Margarida's eggs (though with Skippy Super Chunk peanut butter on a roll, thanks to Pamela), I headed into the heart of Coração Eucarístico to pick up some groceries to fill my bare cupboards. On the walk over, and in the aisles of the supermarket itself, I noticed something I hadn't felt for the last ten days. People were staring at me. True, I'd been living in the bairro for some five months now, but my neon whiteness still glowed that much more in virtually tourist-free BH. In Rio, though I was always the target of street/sand vendors hawking their wares with key words in English they had perfected over the years ("hey, my friend," "beer," "very cheap") well-to-do Cariocas, not keen on wielding their natural malandragem on tourists, wouldn't have batted an eye had I walked down the street in an American flag sunga with George W.'s face tattooed on my chest. The stares from my fellow Belohorizontinians reinforced the truth from back at the beginning of this post: Minas is Texas, Rio is New York. My Brazilian equivalent in Texas (unless he were in progressive Austin) would be getting the same stares from Texans, while a New Yorker would just bump right into him while walking by on the streets of Manhattan, not caring where he was from.

In a strange way, it's just another reminder of how much more similar than different we crazy human beings are in this world.

Define Helplessness

2008-06-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

Helplessness is seeing photos of your flooded hometown on the BBC News, New York Times, and Washington Post websites and wishing you could take a 5000 mile red-eye home to help clean up after the damage.

Hang in there Coralville, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and the rest of Eastern Iowa! While it hurts not being able to be there, seeing you fight through the damage of this lost summer makes me that much more proud to be an Iowan!

Milestones

2008-06-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

Two milestones are within view of where I stand on this Brazilian path. The first is the end of my first semester at PUC-Minas, which will happen sometime later today after I finish my last couple pages for a group paper due online later tonight. The second won’t happen until another two weeks from now. Remember in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the book or the movie, when Sam stops Frodo at a certain point on their journey out of the Shire and says, “If I take one more step, it’ll be the furthest away from home I’ve ever been.” On June 26th, I’ll understand just how Sam felt. That Thursday, which will find me soaking up Rio de Janeiro with some friends from home and from here, will mark 144 days since leaving Iowa, 1 day more than my fall 2004 undergrad study abroad experience in Spain. And that will still be a week or so shy of the next milestone: the halfway point of this trip.

All this talk of milestones and their relation to how near or far I am from home must make it seem like I’m just itching to fly back to my nest. It’s certainly true that there’s much about home that I miss. I left cold February Iowa feeling closer to it than perhaps at any point in my life. At least once a week I have a recurring dream of walking into the Cedar Rapids airport terminal and seeing the faces of family and friends. More than anything from home, I miss all of you. And not only because of the love and warmth and fun that emails and chats and Skype just can’t quite fully capture. Equally because of the challenge that awaits my post-present challenge of how to share with you what I will have learned in my 308 days here. Because of this especially I am itching to fly back to the nest, but by the same token I know that even one day earlier would make what I have to share with you incomplete.

Then again, this is a blog, and thus there’s no time like the present to share exactly where my mind is at as it nears the next mile-marker. Let’s begin with that one; even if it is technically still a few hours in front of me yet, by all intents and purposes I have passed it already.

This last semester has been harder than anything I had ever before experienced, at Iowa or in Spain. Of course there’s the obvious reason: language. My Portuguese is good, but not that good. My mind has a tendency to wander, and while I’ve always been able to get away with this in a class conducted in English, here I have to scramble after missing ten seconds from taking a break in the clouds. Classes here are predominantly based on lecture, though professors and students here still share a quite close-knit relationship (at least at private universities like PUC—I’ve been told that federal university professors can be even scarcer than UI professors…). Because of this bond, lecture and discussion go hand-in-hand. A professor will frequently be interrupted by questions and comments from her students. And insightful questions and comments at that. Many of my Brazilian classmates are (or at least seem) very well-read. My classes here remind me a lot of the “Law in the Muslim World” class that I took my senior year through the UI law school. The professor from that class, Adrien Wing (an absolute treasure of UI), would lecture on a topic, and students would feed off her lecture in a frenzy of questions and comments based on all their past reading and life-experiences that had got them into law school. It was like watching sharks in a pool after someone had put a drop of blood in it. What my well-read Brazilian shark friends are well-read in is, of course, literature critical of the United States in some way, shape, or form: economically, culturally, politically, etc. There’s a difference, however, in criticism and downright bashing of the U.S., and the latter is what is more en vogue here in Brazilian classrooms. Thus, if I let my head drift into the clouds, I’m likely to miss a bite from one of the sharks around me. The attack almost always comes indirectly, as if I weren’t even there. Of course I don’t expect Brazilian college students to hold back their rampant anti-Americanism just because I’m in their midst, but there’s no denying how cowardly it is for a student to throw a comment out into the classroom and not confront me directly with it. Yet, I’ve still been bitten, and the Brazilian rule of argument says I’m supposed to bite back. But in 80% Portuguese, having been attacked from behind, and not having nearly the knowledge base of my own country as my attackers, there’s not much I’m able to say before another shark moves in for the kill, or the topic gets changed.

I will happily admit, though, that my good humor has made me less of a bull’s eye and more of a confidant that many of these students never thought (or perhaps wished) they would’ve had. Yet, in the struggle over exactly what image the U.S. and its people deserve in this world, I’m still simply a Sam, a little person armed only with his wits and talents and entrusted with saving the world from being destroyed by hatred. Really, the first day I walked into a classroom here was “the farthest away from home I’d ever been.”

This end to the semester is the perfect opportunity to reflect on the person I was with this scholarship in my hand and this trip still in front of me, and who I am now, 130 days into it. Even after traveling several times already before this trip, I was honestly pretty naïve, believing that my sheer presence would automatically bring about “goodwill and mutual understanding”, the goals of this scholarship, wherever I went. Instead, I have had to work extremely hard, and I’m still no match to stem the tide of hatred and ignorance. I was also naïve enough to think that I would be just the person Brazil needed to have its story (or rather, many stories) shared with its cousin to the north. I do know that what I will share, through words and pictures, will go far in increasing the understanding of Brazil back home. But that’s simply because we don’t have a great understanding of Brazil back home. Brazil needs me because we are blind and deaf, not because Brazil is mute.

If there’s anything this trip has reminded me of, it’s that. We are a blind and deaf nation. But I believe that this, miraculously, is changing, and I am proud to be a part of the generation that is opening up our nation’s eyes and ears. Our generation, perhaps more than any other before us, realizes that we are not, nor have we ever been, alone in this world. Soon we may all realize that we are not on top of this world anymore, but rather one of several blocs of global powers. Brazil has taught me that Brazil likely will not be what defines my life once I return home. Rather, my post-present challenge of sharing another world with my own will become my M.O. Exactly how? That’s for the next 178 days—and then some—to determine.

Brazil in the News, aka Buying Some Time

2008-06-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

This next week will be my busiest yet here in Brazil. Papers due Monday and Wednesday, final tests Monday and Tuesday, and a presentation to give at a local military school Wednesday (which I will definitely write about afterward) all spell long hours of studying and short hours of sleep until 8 days from now. Thus, serious writing won't get done here until after the storm has passed. Yet, I can't deny that I have been neglecting my audience. So here is what I'll do. Below are some links to interesting news articles related to Brazil that also have relevance for us Gringos. I hope you find them enlightening, or at least something a bit more than a cop-out for me buying another week-and-a-half's worth of blogging time.

June 2006 Washington Post article about how Wal-Mart is trying to dip into the Fair Trade Coffee market, starting with specialty coffee growers in the south of Minas Gerais. The location in the article reads "Poco Fundo" though it should instead be "Poço Fundo," meaning "Deep Well."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/11/AR2006061100813.html

April 2005 article about Brazil's dominance in the Ethanol Market, domestically and internationally.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0417-23.htm

February 2007 National Geographic article about the environmental downside to the bio-fuels market.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070208-ethanol.html

July 2007 BBC News article about the "trade row", as the British would call it, between the U.S. and Brazil.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6920189.stm

July 2007 NPR News report about the unorthodox alliance between the U.S. agro-biz corporation Cargill and environmentalists working toward the common goal of curbing the deforestation of the Amazon.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11375220

May 2008 BBC News report on Brazil's dilemma of how to simultaneously develop and preserve the Amazon. On this page there are a dozen or so links that can help clarify the "Amazon Paradox" facing Brazil and the rest of the world. Basically, as I stated in an earlier post ("Anti-Americanism in Brazil"), the battle over the Amazon goes like this:

The Amazon is "the lungs of the world," absorbing vast amounts of the world's carbon and producing between 1/6th and 1/5th of the world's oxygen.

Brazil has legal sovereignty over a good 2/3rds of the forest, the rest belonging to Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.

Deforestation of the Amazon is increasing at an accelerating rate.

Wealthy and powerful agro-businessmen, many of whom are prominent politicians in Brazil, are behind the deforestation, following behind a "manifest destiny" banner of pushing the frontier that has existed in Brazil's national identity since it was a colony.

Brazil does not have the infrastructure nor the political integrity to take on the developmentalist agro-biz interests.

The world, led primarily by the U.S. and the E.U., wants Brazil to hand over some of its sovereignty of the Amazon so that international measures can be taken to help stop deforestation.

Brazil, forever caught between "1st and 3rd worlds", interprets this international plea as a neo-colonialist trick that will see American and European MNCs strip Brazil's forest of its valuable resources.

Brazil has retorted that it will internationalize the Amazon only if the world agrees to internationalize the oil fields of the Middle East, all museums throughout the world, and while we're at it--as one Brazilian columnist put it--how about we do away with all international boarders for good.

The conflict thus ends in a bitter stalemate.

But that's just my interpretation. You can read for yourselves below.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7399109.stm

Until next "real" post! I hope you enjoy!

Visions from my first 100 days in Brazil

2008-05-15T15:39:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe 100 days have gone by already. Actually, today, May 15th, is my 102nd day here. You don't seem to realize how fast the march of time actually is until you look back at the footprints you have left behind. Or, in the case of this post, those footprints you chose to immortalize. I must apologize, I've been very bad about sharing the pictures I've taken while in this land, aside from those I've used to supplement my writing. To date, I've taken 1355 photos - a healthy 90 or so per week. The wealth of subjects to snap here is unbelievable, though maybe that's simply because I'm a foreigner and everything different around me is naturally photo worthy. Whatever it is that has made Brazil so photogenic for me, what's certain is that I will forever be in its debt for the way in which such a diversity of subjects has helped me hone that intimate connection between subject, eye, and index finger. Here is a small collection of those subjects that have screamed out for me to immortalize them over the last 102 days. Espero que desfrutem!

Palmeiras, Parque Municipal, Belo Horizonte

House Plant on the veranda of my first apartment, Belo Horizonte

Old City, Vitória

Path through a coffee farm, Santa Maria de Jetibá

Vendor and his prey, Praia da Costa, Vitória

Tree, Praia da Costa, Vitória

Military Police intervene in an after-party scuffle outside my first apartment, Belo Horizonte

Bench with fallen tree flowers, PUC-Minas campus, Belo Horizonte

Mineirão soccer stadium during the Cruzeiro - Ituiutaba semifinal match in the Copa Mineira, Belo Horizonte

Fans react after Cruzeiro's first goal of the game (which Cruzeiro won 3-1, going on to beat rival Atlético 5-0 and 1-0 in the finals to win the Copa Mineira)

Military Police provide security for Minas Gerais Governor Aécio Neves (not pictured) during the annual Tiradentes ceremony in Ouro Preto

Igreja Nossa Senhora do Carmo, Ouro Preto

Old man with Coke can, São Lourenço

Woodpile, Fazenda São Benedito, Sul de Minas

The road north to Belo Horizonte

Building neighboring the Belo Horizonte Rotary Club building

Man resting on a wall under a palm tree, Ouro Preto

Palm shadows on footpath, Inhatim nature reserve,
near Belo Horizonte

Doce de Leite (Part 1)

2008-04-28T12:46:00.000-07:00

There’s not much to do on a Friday night in the Coração Eucarístico. Seniors mostly populate the bairro, and those of bar-going age in the Coreu (as it is affectionately called) that do go to one of the four local bars are mostly well out of college. Unlike at American universities, where students live in dorms or apartments or Greek houses close to campus (and thereby equally close to a wealth of drinking establishments), in Brazil it’s rare for college students to do what Ricardo and I are doing: start a república and live on their own. The vast majority of students still live at home throughout college, commuting to class everyday by bus, car, or (to quote the Southern comedian James Gregory, “for those that’s got money”) taxi. Any going out is done as close to home as possible, though every now and then you’ll treat yourself by going out in one of the several downtown bairros. However, doing so means taking a bus there and, if you’re lucky, back; few bus lines operate in the late night/wee morning hours, so more often than not the return trip is made by taxi, whether you’s got money or not.

The last couple Friday nights I went out to the theatre and then drinks afterward with some friends from school, being fortunate enough to catch one of the three buses per hour that make the witching hour trek back to the Coreu. (Theatre is very big in Brazilian culture, and it shows in BH, a city that enjoys dozens of houses and one of the most famous Brazilian companies, the Grupo Galpão. This craze for the stage is definitely something worth delving deeper into for a future post.) This past Friday night, however, I wasn’t in much of a going out mood. Yet at the same time I didn’t want to just be stuck at home in front of the TV or the Net. One would think that the Coreu would have a movie theatre at the very least. To my knowledge it doesn’t even have a bingo parlor (or its Brazilian equivalent) for its large contingency of seniors. So then, what to do?

Suddenly it hits me. I get the desire to “mexer na cozinha,” which I’d translate (aptly so, in my case) as “mess around in the kitchen.” I figure I’m here to experience Brazilian culture, so why not try to reproduce that culture right here right now in the form of something edible? I run through the list in my head of possible dishes I could make. I’ll probably have to start with something easy, something that requires relatively few ingredients and little preparation. Then I remember Dona Dirce telling us how easy it was to make Doce de Leite (I think in the U.S. we use the Spanish Dulce de Leche, but for those who aren't familiar with it, it's a decadently sweet, thick cross between pudding and caramel). According to her grandmotherly advice, all it takes is milk, sugar, and a pinch of salt (which keeps the milk from separating), which you mix and boil until it reaches caramely goodness. It’s settled. I grab some cash and head to the local bakery/convenient store just down the street to get what I need.

I can’t remember exactly how much milk and sugar I need, so I grab a couple liters and a kilo of sugar. (I apologize, this is going to sound very ethnocentric, but to me the metric system belongs in the laboratory, not the kitchen, as much of a lab as it may be. When I’m told I’m getting 300mL of juice and a burger with 150g of meat I feel more like a lab rat being experimented on than a human being that drinks 12oz. and eats a quarter-pounder. Maybe herein lie the roots of so much misunderstanding between our worlds.) Also, of course, the ingredients are only half the battle, so when I get home I pull up a recipe for the dessert online to get to know the cooking process in greater detail. According to the culinária mineira section at www.bussolanet.com.br, I need two liters of milk and 750 grams of sugar. I have to put the milk in a large saucepan and place on the burner to boil. Once it reaches boiling, I add the sugar, turn down the heat, and stir. For 45 minutes. For some reason I had assumed the magical Brazilian climate would intervene and 5 minutes after the mixture is made the milky-sugary mass would turn creamy. But, I figure this is above all a learning experience, and so if the lesson takes 45 minutes, that’s not a minute less than it has to be.

I boil. I mix. I start to stir. And stir. And stir.

And stir.

30 minutes stirring in front of a stove. I look over at my laundry hanging up in the next room. I imagine what it must have been like for housewives on Brazilian farms at the beginning of the 20th century. Or (who am I kidding?) today even. Slaving away all day long to keep the domestics duties of the fazenda in order. Or what about even one century earlier, when the person slaving away all day long was, in fact, a slave? I can’t begin to imagine what that must have been like.

I keep stirring. My YouTube Generation self is bored out of its mind. This calls for a beer. I open the fridge and pull out the last of our stock of Bohemia, a brand that makes nicer deck chairs than beer. Our next 12-pack will be of Itaipava, a crisp, unpretentious, Mexican-like beer. I take a drink and turn back to my stirring. Still liquid.

The bitter smell of too-warm milk—an easily recognizable smell for any ex-barista—wafts up from the cauldron in front of me. I wonder if maybe there really is too much milk in the mix now. Time for a taste. I bring the wooden spoon to my mouth, blow it cool, and dab my tongue on it. Sure enough, sweeter than God’s breath. So when the @%&! does it turn brown and creamy?!

I keep stirring. I take another swig of Bohemia and make another bitter beer face. I look at my watch. 45 minutes on the dot. My caveman logic determines that what I need is more solids to go with the bubbling liquid. I dump another small-glass-cup-full of sugar (100g? 150?) into the mix. Half expecting this to be a catalytic action, my spirits drop when I don’t see a change in state after another five minutes.

In light of the excess amount of fossil fuel used in this experiment, and the fact that this is just that, an experiment, I decide to turn off the burner and let the pot cool. Maybe it’s in the cooling process that the syrup slowly changes to goo. And if not, at the very least I’ve made a luxurious mating ground for Dengue mosquitoes.

I decide to upgrade my beer-break and take my mug into the living room and turn on the TV. It’s a Friday night, so the quality is pretty sparse. I flip through the dozen or so channels about three or four times before deciding to head back to the kitchen and meet my fate. Miraculously, the mixture I find, while still quite warm, has started to congeal. I bring the pot into the living room and continue to stir it while watching TV. Slowly I begin to feel more resistance as I stir. When I pick up the spoon, a thin, tan strand falls back into the mix. I ask myself, if all it takes is for the hot mix to cool to finish the process, then why can’t I just mix cold milk with sugar, stir, and be done with it?! That would save so much time and energy, both my own and that in the gas tank. But that would be too easy I guess.

When the saucepan has cooled enough I decide to stick it in the fridge to expedite the cooling process. It’s late anyway and I’m tired and Ricardo wants to show me some (what else?) YouTube videos and quite frankly I don’t want to have to look at this goop until tomorrow morning. I put it on the top shelf and shut the door. Out of sight, out of mind.

I wake up Saturday morning and take what has become my routine walk down to the bakery to get some fresh bread and rolls for breakfast. Upon my return I open the fridge and pull out the now ice cold saucepan. I stir the beige mass. Not the sticky hard I had hoped for, but not liquid either. At least it’s not a total loss. At least by look and feel. Now for the taste. I put a couple spoonfuls on my plate next to a couple rolls, and soon the gelatiny mass pools around the solid forms like the Blob. Looks like I’ll have no choice but to eat the rolls with a bit of frosting on them. I break off a piece of the roll and take a bite. The cold granulations are perhaps, yes, a little too sweet, and together with the roll I feel like more like I’m eating a caramel-frosted Krispy Kreme Donut than the creamy Brazilian delicacy I had begun Friday night hoping for. But it’s edible. What’s done is done. There’s no use crying over spilled milk. Or poorly made sweet milk. I know I’ll have a second chance to experiment and hopefully come up with something closer to what I had hypothesized. And probably a third and a fourth. (Who am I kidding, probably a 34th.) In the meantime, there’s still a liter-and-a-half of industrial strength Krispy Kreme frosting in the fridge.

Dessert anyone?

Anti-Americanism in Brazil

2008-04-16T19:17:00.000-07:00

Not quite four years ago, I studied abroad for a semester in Murcia, Spain and got the chance to live the “Erasmus experience.” Erasmus is a government-sponsored exchange program offered to European university students who wish to study in another European country. Some European universities have recently opened up the program to students from around the world, offering the opportunity for pockets of international synergy to take shape across the Continent and the British Isles, whether in the classroom or the pub. So, à la L’Auberge Espagnol, I studied, lived, and partied with students from all over the European Union, Russia, CIS countries, Japan, and, of course, the United States. With so many people from so many different backgrounds concentrated into so small an area, the logical question asked after meeting a fellow international student was, “So where you from?” Europeans, I found, have a general notion of where a fellow Continental (or Brit or Irishman) may come from solely by appearance. My neon whiteness could have made me hail from anywhere north of the Alps. “Estados Unidos,” I’d reply to this question, “¿Y tú?” More often than not, before I’d get an answer in return, I’d be greeted with a shocked, indignant, and standoffish, “Oh…”

Such a welcome should have come as no surprise. Most of my European acquaintances had likely seen—or participated in—lots of anti-war (read anti-U.S.) protests in the year-and-a-half since the United States invaded Iraq. Many Spaniards took American foreign policy personally, as it was unquestionably Spain’s linkage to it that cost the lives of 198 people in the March 11, 2004 train bombing in Madrid. Thus their disdain toward the U.S.-led war in Iraq, along with that of many of their European brethren, became equally as personal, directed toward my fellow Americans and I as if we had beat the war drums ourselves. The anti-Americanism we faced from our peers reached its climax in the days following George W. Bush’s re-election as president in November, and then tapered off as many Europeans, their hopes for regime change vanquished, resigned themselves to the fact that they would have to endure another four years of the Bush Administration’s folly.

I should make two points clear. First, not every European (or, better, non-American) received us so scornfully. My fellow Americans and I made lots of friends with professors, members of the community, and fellow students, and while several discussions on American foreign policy inevitably arose, they were always peaceful, and the moments of mirth we shared vastly outnumbered them.

Second, while the war in Iraq was the focal point of the anti-Americanism we faced, in the end it was “merely” a bloodstained banner behind which marched hundreds of documented atrocities committed, directly or indirectly, by American interventionism since the 1950s. Vietnam. Cambodia. Nicaragua. El Salvador. Israel and Palestine. Not to mention the numerous human rights abuses perpetrated by American-led multinational corporations that all too often fly under the radar of world media. And then there’s the U.S. Government’s stance on global warming. And the abandon with which U.S. soft power (Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, McDonalds) has so deeply penetrated cultures around the world. And I’m sure other grievances that I’m not yet aware of.

Brazilian anti-Americanism shares the same roots as the European variety above. Yet it has several other components that give it a distinctly autochthonous (and arguably more fervent) flavor. Che Guevara grew up and fought in Brazil’s backyard, the same backyard where the United States bullied left-leaning Latin American regimes for decades, beating them over the head with a Monroe Doctrine revitalized by the Cold War threat of communism spreading to the Western Hemisphere. Brazilians watched from the window as Salvador Allende was assassinated and replaced by the ruthless Augusto Pinochet in Chile during the Ford Administration. They continue to watch as U.S. aid dollars get funneled to Colombian paramilitary forces, arguably more brutal in their treatment of innocent Colombian civilians than the FARC guerrilla forces they’ve sworn to fight.

And now, after all that Brazil has witnessed from its window, could the U.S. be so crazy as to invade Brazil itself? Many here don’t believe such a scenario to be too far-fetched. In fact, they see U.S. military aid to Colombia as a precursor to an eventual joint U.S.-Colombia invasion and occupation of the Amazon Rainforest. The recent incursion of Colombian forces into Ecuadorian territory to kill a key FARC commander, which spurred the mobilization of both Venezuelan and Ecuadorian troops along their respective borders with Colombia, further justified many Brazilians’ fears of such an event. Where do their fears come from?

Much like the slanderous emails circulating in the United States claiming that Barack Obama is an America-and-freedom-hating Islamist terrorist linked to Al-Qaeda, here in Brazil many people have been forwarded an email showing “Page 76” of a purported American junior high geography textbook. At the bottom of the page is a map of Brazil that depicts the Amazon Rainforest as an “Internationally Protected Zone” that is principally under the governance of the United States. The text alongside the map lauds the U.S. for rescuing the endangered region from the grip of “bandits” and “drug traffickers” that inhabit the various “kingdoms” of South America. The text appears with a translation in Portuguese. The page is unquestionably false. First, such garbage would never have cleared reviews by textbook clearinghouses in the U.S., and second, words such as “explorate” used in place of exploit (from the Portuguese explorar) and “cert” for certain (from certo) clearly reveal the forger’s likely Brazilian identity. However, the average Brazilian citizen, with limited knowledge of English, is more than likely to believe this libel. The fact that the creator of the email declared that this page came from a textbook used in ALL American junior high geography classes only succeeds in fomenting greater mass fear, anger, and hatred among Brazilians toward the United States. Sadly, it should come as no surprise that such fear could spread like wildfire in this country. Brazilians witnessed the impunity in which the United States went to war in Iraq to secure its continued control of one of the world’s most important resources: oil. With one-fifth of the world’s fresh water residing in the Amazon, it’s perhaps not so unnatural that Brazilians would think the U.S. would have a hair-trigger pointed at such a vast source of an even more important resource. And according to “Page 76”, we’re not only crazy enough to do it. We already did.

(This photo isn't mine, though who knows, maybe I'll get up there...)

I have been asked on many an occasion to whom I believe the Amazon belongs, even before I learned of the “Page 76 hoax.” I have always definitively answered, “Brazil,” with the caveat that if the Amazon does indeed belong to Brazil, then Brazilians should be fighting to protect it from being totally destroyed by rogue loggers on the bankroll of Big Agriculture. While in their hearts I’m sure nearly all Brazilians agree with me, to many such a comeback is tantamount to sympathies for military occupation and internationalization. The worst have been exchanges in which fellow students have asked my opinion on Global Warming, namely, if I believe it exists. Equally as definitively I have answered, “Yes, it does exists, and the U.S., along with China and India, need to do a better job of cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time,” I continue, “Brazil needs to stop slashing and burning the Amazon, as this has the doubly pernicious effect of releasing tons of carbon into the atmosphere while destroying the organisms that would otherwise absorb that carbon right back up. The Amazon is, without question, the ‘lungs of the world’, and while all countries are smokers, Brazil, the caretaker of those lungs, is cutting them away lobe by lobe.” Again, rather than opening up a healthy dialog focused on changing the world, my answer only further justifies Brazilian suspicion of American interest in the Amazon. The debate could go on. So far, it hasn’t.

The BBC World Service released the results of a poll earlier this month in which citizens of 34 countries were asked to assess the influence (positive or negative) that each of the same 34 countries has in the world.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7324337.stm)

Indeed, while data pertaining to any country in such a poll are interesting and important, those involving the United States are always the main event (followed closely by those on China). According to the results, 39% of Brazilians believe the U.S. has a mainly positive influence in the world. 40% believe American influence is mainly negative, leaving 21% that 1) believe U.S. influence is neither positive nor negative, 2) think that whether it’s positive or negative depends on further qualification of the question, or 3) are undecided. On the ground, that seems about right, about half and half. The 39% has consisted of Rotarians, Ricardo and his family, close friends at PUC, and common working-class folk I’ve had a chance to meet—I’m perhaps the only American they’d ever met. Of the 40% I can count most of my professors, and most students in my history classes, many of these sporting dreadlocks, beards, and Che Guevara T-shirts. Indeed nearly the entire crop of young and budding Brazilian intellectuals falls into this second column.

It’s not hard to find stuff to justify criticism of the United States. I’ve already supplied an abridged version of the laundry list of global grievances. It is equally not hard to see how criticism can quickly become anti-Americanism among intellectuals in a country that has been such a close witness to the effects of American interventionism and is afraid it will soon find itself even closer. It is equally-equally not hard for me to dig up stuff on which to criticize Brazil. I’ve already mentioned the Amazon and the treacherous ground I walk on there. But what about social and economic inequality? Disparity in education? Overblown machismo and objectification of women?

“Let he who is without sin…”

Maybe it’s fate that once again I’ll be abroad during a presidential election. Whether founded or not, this election, as was the case 4 years ago, will be the grand litmus test in the eyes of many around the world of how much Americans wish to move closer to or distance themselves from the rest of the world. Although a Democratic candidate has yet to be officially established, Brazil has already declared itself a blue state. John McCain, while in many ways a moderate maverick in the Republican Party, will be unable to escape the shadow of George W. Bush in this election. His comment that the United States would stay in Iraq for 100 years if need be hasn’t helped his worldwide popularity. Should he win, it’s likely that 40% will grow.

While my political preference is now likely quite clear, I’m no political foot soldier. The vast majority of the rest of the world may see a vote for McCain as a manifestation of American ignorance, yet it's Americans who vote for the candidate who best appeals to their convictions, whoever that may be. That’s democracy. In the same vein, my bringing tidings of anti-Americanism is not a call for us Americans to drastically change our way of life. I love Hawkeye football Saturdays. I love road-tripping and roller coasters. I love barbeques. I love them just as much as I love traveling and learning about the rest of the world. We Americans need not and should not give up that culture that we identify with, that gives us a sense of home. Yet while we need not give up our culture, we must not be reactionary. We must reflect on who we are as American citizens. And we must do so with the knowledge that we are at the same time citizens of the world. Entrusted with such dual citizenship, we must look upon ourselves as Martin Luther King did, in an anti-war speech that he gave April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his death:

“I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation.”

While we may deserve the criticism we receive from abroad, we’re better than whatever skewed anti-American vision a PUC-Minas history professor may have of us. We have integrity. The world just doesn’t see it anymore. Whether with our vote, or with our actions at home or abroad, it’s time for us to prove the world wrong.

Ricardo

2008-04-03T05:01:00.000-07:00

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

Die Pommern – Os Pomerano

2008-03-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

Everyday I walk around Brazilian streets feeling like I stick out like a Garbanzo bean in a pot of chili. Brazilians pride themselves on their pop-culturally-rooted identity as a racially mixed people. “Brazilian” has almost become more of a race than a nationality, though unfortunately the racial politics of Brazil still continue to put whites at the top and blacks at the bottom of the racial food chain. Indians and people of mixed race have their own “racial capital”, as it were, in the pop culture market, though they still live below the glass ceiling that white Brazilians use as their floor. In a future post I’ll devote more analysis to the many issues of race in Brazil, or at least as best I can through this medium. For now, they’ll have to suffice as an anecdotal introduction to the following story.

The concept of who is “white” in Brazil is indeed as blurry as any definition of race here (or anywhere for that matter). But in the eyes of this descendent of Norwegians, Germans, English, and Irish (with tiny drops of Finnish and French blood), to be white in Brazil is to have Southern European ancestry: Portuguese, Italian, Spanish. To be white is to have straight dark hair and olive skin. Which makes me hyper-white. Incandescent white. When I walk down the street in Brazil, I glow. Naturally, everyone stares.

A couple weeks ago, I found streets in Brazil where for once I didn’t feel like I was wearing a scarlet F for foreigner.

In the middle of a Brazilian March, the sun rises at 5:30. By 6:30 the morning is already well underway, and the first grains of traffic are beginning to pour through the rush hour glass. At around 7:00, flat, coastal Vitória - where I had gone to stay for Semana Santa with Ricardo (I still need to tell his story!) and his family - has turned into the mountainous interior of Espírito Santo. I soon become more aware of my place in a small car passenger seat as it winds in and out of curve after curve on the sinuous mountain roads that have replaced the straight coastal highway. I am riding with Ricardo’s mom, Lígia Mallaco, to the town of Santa Maria de Jetibá. Lígia is a chronic care doctor in Vitória, but every Monday she makes the trek to Santa Maria, a town of about 33,000, to work at the local clinic there. Lígia, along with the rest of her family, is a Baptist. Her faith is very important to her, and after name, age and marital status, religion is the most important information she could glean from someone. When I told her I was Lutheran, she insisted that I join her weekly trip to Santa Maria in order to get to know the majority of the local inhabitants there: os pomeranos.

The Pommern people inhabited Pomerania, a land that once covered the northeast of Prussia and the northwest of Poland. Emigration from Pomerania began in the 1870s in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war and the unification of Germany under Bismarck, as the Pommern people considered—and still consider—themselves distinctly Pommern, not Deutsch. About 4,000 Pommern left for Brazil, settling in the fertile valleys in the interior of the state of Espírito Santo, and establishing the towns of Santa Maria de Jetibá and Santa Leopoldina. A further contingent of Pommern settled much further south in the more temperate Brazilian states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Following Germany’s defeat and Poland’s thrashing in World War II, more Pommern emigrated to Brazil, as well as the U.S., Australia, and West Germany, leaving virtually any remnant of Pomerania to mere memory.

Santa Maria is only about 50 miles from Vitória. But after the two-hour drive through thick and virtually uninhabited Brazilian brush, my imagination could have fooled me into believing I’m hundreds of miles away from the urbanized coast. As I look at the faces around me, I could fool myself further that I was on another planet. Or in Germany. Or even back in Iowa, albeit on one of its hottest August days. Blonde, red, and mouse-brown hair falls over pale white faces. White and cream buildings with brown cross-latched wood frames line the streets. Street are named after such former local dignitaries as Frederico Berger and Guerlinda Nitz. Businesses lining the streets have names with more consonants than an entire Portuguese sentence.

Such names, however, are the only Pommern words to be found in written form around town. The Pommern language is strictly oral. Pommern children learn to speak it from their parents, yet learn to read, write, and speak Portuguese in the local schools. Indeed, the Pommern are not the only folk in town. The streets of Santa Maria de Jetibá—Jetibá, by the way, is the name of a local species of tree—are also filled with the Southern European and Afro-Brazilian faces one would expect to find in any Brazilian city or town. My tour guide for the day is a friend of the Mallaco family, Paula, herself a descendent of Italians and Portuguese. Her mother runs a successful beauty salon in town, and through her mother’s clientele, and just through being a social butterfly, Paula seems to know just about everyone in Santa Maria. As we walk up and down street after street, she smiles and waves hello to nearly everyone we pass, and even stops to talk to several close family friends. To most, her greeting is the standard Brazilian “tudo bem?” To those who are obviously Pommern, it’s “ales gaute?” Forgive me, I know only about 17 words in German—and I’m writing my phonetic interpretation of the Pommern greeting, since, like I said, it’s a non-written language—but I can’t help but think, isn’t ales gaute pretty close to alle gute? Ja?

The day has its traditional Brazilian breaks: lunch round midday, a small sesta afterward, a break for coffee and a snack in the late afternoon. In between, however, it’s all Santa Maria. Paula, and later her sister Polyanna, takes me around to see typical Pommern flower gardens, a local egg farm (Santa Maria produces the most eggs of anywhere else in Brazil), a small coffee farm, the local cemetery, and, of course, the very Nordic-looking Lutheran church. All Pommern are Lutheran. To convert to either Catholicism or any of the dozens of Brazilian Evangelical sects amounts to heresy, and is punishable by excommunication not only from the Lutheran Church, but also from one’s Pommern heritage. Much like Amish who become “English.”

This practice highlights perhaps the most important feature of the Pommern. Although they won’t hold back a “bom dia” or an “ales gaute” from a non-Pommern, the Pommern are by and large a reserved people who keeps its affairs occulted from the non-Pommern public. Lígia, who relies on her warm and caring personality when treating her patients, has commented on how virtually impossible it is for her to get Pommern patients to open up to her during visits. She has also cited how rampant rates of alcoholism, depression, and domestic violence further complicate the obdurate nature of most Pommern. A battered Pommern women is sadly more inclined to remain steadfast to her roots (i.e. her abusive and likely alcoholic husband) than to open up to a “foreigner” like Lígia in order to gain reprieve, lest she risk further beatings or, worse, excommunication. In unfortunately not-so-extreme cases, suicide, and often the murder-suicide of an entire family not unlike the tragedy the Iowa City community recently witnessed, becomes the solution to the above dilemma. On the morning drive out, Lígia informed me that Santa Maria de Jetibá has one of the highest suicide rates per capita in the world.

Before heading back to the local clinic to hitch a ride back with one of Lígia’s colleagues (Lígia had recently begun to stay overnight at a hotel and work at the clinic on Tuesday as well), I stand on the balcony of Paula and Polyanna’s home and take some pictures of life in Santa Maria in the remaining minutes of daylight. About 100 yards away in the street below me my eyes catch a boy rocking lazily back and forth on his bike. His blonde hair and pale skin give him away as Pommern. As I capture his soul in my camera, I can’t help but wonder if maybe he’s my 13th cousin, 4 times removed. Really, we are, all of us human beings, related, sharing a common great-times-10,000-grandmother who roamed the savannahs of East Africa with her children who were constantly looking out to the horizon and wondering what futures lay beyond. Thus, for me to feel any greater relation or closeness based on “race” to this boy below me than to any other of my umpteenth cousins around me, in Brazil or anywhere, would simply be ridiculous. Still, though I am certainly equally as closed off from his culture as any other foreigner around him, after 6 weeks of stares, of glowing like a radioactive Garbanzo bean in Brazil—and being referred to once as a “bicho goiaba”, a bright white larva that infests guava trees—in the presence of this Pommern boy I can’t help but feel a tiny bit closer to home.

But then again, for me, a white American who can go pretty much anywhere in the world that his government will let him, to lament any racial discrimination directed at me is WAY out of my league.

Cruzeiro vs. Atlético: O Clássico

2008-03-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

***NOTE: Unfortunately, none of the images that appear on this post are mine. I didn’t have it in me to bring even my little camera into the chaos that is O Clássico. You don’t bring your babies into the middle of a war-zone.

Imagine, Iowans, that Ames and Iowa City were the same city – i.e. that ISU and UI were located in the exact same town, and that their football teams shared a stadium. Everyday you’d walk along the street not knowing if a passerby was a friend or foe. During football season, the Hawks would have their home games, and the Clones theirs, and this hypothetical city would belong to whoever’s team had such a home game on a Saturday. But at some point during the season, the two teams would have to play each other. It would in essence be a home game for both teams, and on this fateful day it would be revealed, either within the gladiator arena or in the parking lots outside, who was friend and who was foe. Imagine such a hellish world, and then multiply all the passion, the pomp and circumstance, and the slightest will to pop that jerk Clone fan in the face times 100, and you have O Clássico – The Classic – which pits Belo Horizonte’s two local soccer teams—and their fans—against each other.

100 years ago this year, the Clube Atlético Mineiro, known simply as Atlético, or by its mascot Galo (Rooster), was formed here in Belo Horizonte (Mineiro is the adjective for this state, Minas Gerais). Originally, as was the case with any soccer—who are we kidding, football—club in Brazil at the time, Galo was a team of the elite, and subsequently only hired players that likewise came from an elite pedigree. I.e., no Afro-Brazilian players need apply. In the middle part of the 20th century, smaller clubs from the interior of Minas Gerais started hiring players from poorer backgrounds, many of whom were Afro-Brazilian, and many of whom were much better than their cake-eating counterparts. These smaller teams began to beat up on prestigious urban teams like Galo, and to save face Galo decided to change tactics. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Since this time, Galo’s identity has shifted at the end of its century of existence to a team of the masses, a team of the poor, the favelados, those that live in favelas.

87 years ago this year, Galo’s rival, Cruzeiro Esporte Clube, known simply as Cruzeiro—or, to keep pace in the rhyming wars of the two teams’ songs, Zeiro—was formed by Italian entrepreneurs in Belo Horizonte. Cruzeiro has followed nearly the same path as Galo in terms of being a team of the elite in the beginning and incorporating poorer, Afro-Brazilian players near the middle of its lifetime—in fact, Brazilian national team hero-turned-has-been Ronaldo, who came from a poor family in Rio, played for Cruzeiro in the early 90s, starting at the tender age of 17. However, though today the team enjoys a following of both rich and poor—really, Galo has rich fans and poor fans alike as well—Cruzeiro has maintained, more or less, its image as a team of the elite, quite possibly in a way to preserve some uncommon ground to separate it from Galo. From an outsider’s perspective, whatever the line is that separates the identity of these two teams and their fans, it’s blurry at best.

Each team has its run-of-the-mill fans, who follow their beloved club and detest their rival, but their fan-ship is all talk. At the extremes of each side lives the vanguard of each team’s fan base. For Atlético, it’s Galoucura, a contraction between Galo and Loucura (madness), thus meaning something like “Rooster Madness,” though our Hawk’s Nest would be something semantically closer, albeit not nearly as crazy. For Cruzeiro, not surprisingly due to the club’s Italian roots, there’s the Mafia Azul, the Blue Mafia (Cruzeiro’s colors are blue and white, Galo’s black and white). These fans on the fringe have their own organizations, their own shirts and pants that have a variety of slogans (one I saw for Mafia Azul said, “You either run with us or run from us – only God can judge us”), and images of their respective mascots in battle gear (I forgot to mention that Cruzeiro’s mascot is a fox—there are a lot of shirts with the image of a fox eating a rooster). Why battle gear? These groups have more hatred for each other than the average fans, and when given the chance their members won’t hesitate to take their natural Brazilian machismo one step further and beat the piss out of their rivals until they're dead or the police come and break up the fight.

All right, that should be sufficient background for the average Gringo to understand the craziness that is football in Brazil. Now let’s get to the game itself.

So Ricardo, the kid I live with from Vitória (I still need to tell his story), is a huge Cruzeiro fan. I came here neutral, but have since been baptized by this Mafia Azul commando-in-training as a Cruzeiro fan, albeit a mild one. Two weeks ago we went to a game between Cruzeiro and one of Minas Gerais’ small interior teams, Vila Nova. It was a brilliant game; Cruzeiro played terrible until the final 15 minutes of the game, coming back from 2-1 down to win the match 3-2 on a PK with 5 minutes to go. The game mattered little, however, and thus only about 10,000 or so fans showed up to the Mineirão stadium, which can comfortably hold 80,000, though has in the past seated—or rather stood—over 100,000. After this game, Ricardo was set on going to O Clássico to make up for such a rather tranquil match. I was leery. Everyone I’d talked to about O Clássico had told me how dangerous it was, how easy it would be to get caught in the crossfire between Galoucura and Mafia Azul. In the end, however, I made up my mind to go. A friend of a friend stood in line to get our tickets, which sold out in less than 8 hours. (As a side note, the tickets are CHEAP here! Student tickets cost 7.50 Reais, about $4.50, while general admission is still a mere 15 Reais, or 9 bucks. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Gary Barta!) Ricardo and I, along with the grandson of Dona Dirce, Lucas, decided to take a bus from Coração Eurarístico to Pampulha, a wealthy neighborhood on the north side of the city where the guy who bought our tickets lived, which was conveniently a 10-minute walk from the Mineirão. This was a HUGE mistake. The three of us resolved to wear nothing at all having to do with Cruzeiro, which turned out to be the best decision any of us had ever made in our lives. As soon as the bus stopped at the southern edge of downtown, about 30 Galoucura members hopped on, and almost immediately began singing their war songs—dozens of them. Fans of both teams have pretty ugly chants they shout at one another. The Hawkeye creed that “I’d rather have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother at Iowa State” doesn’t even come close to the dirtiness—and, admittedly, creativity—of the mud these two sides hurl at each other. One of the cleanest and most popular, which both sides use equally (as I said, it’s a war of rhymes), goes “Ei, Galo/Zeiro, vai tomar no cu!” (“Hey, Galo/Zeiro, you’re going to take it in the ass!”) During the 45-minute bus ride to Pampulha, the three of us sat still and never even thought of making eye contact. Luckily, our silence in the midst of this maelstrom didn’t give away our allegiance.

Once we arrived in Pamulha, we chilled for a bit at the ticket-buyer’s house (I missed his name) and waited for some more friends to arrive. We ended up heading off to the Mineirão in a group of 9, which included two other Americans—the first I’d met since arriving here, who ended up being missionaries and friends of a friend of the ticket-buyer. Once again, we were lucky to have worn nothing Cruzeiro, or anything blue for that matter, as the route from the ticket-buyer’s house to the Mineirão took us right through the Galo “tailgate” as it were. Droves of crazy, drunk Atlético fans were getting away with as much mayhem as they could under the constant vigilance of the omnipresent Military Police, ready to break someone’s skull upon with their batons at a moment’s notice. We made our way to the Cruzeiro side of the stadium and, after being patted down by the MP, went in to find some seats. We were in the lower deck of the stadium and amid the throngs of fans we were lucky enough to find seats that gave us a pretty decent view of the field. I wish I could’ve brought my camera in to capture the scene we walked into. The Mineirão is more or less an oval. Behind one goal sits (again, read stands) the Galo fans, behind the other those for Cruzeiro. Along the sides of the oval, taking up about 4 whole sections on either end, is an empty buffer zone, home to only the MP and their German Shepherds. Absolutely no chances are taken that could result in all out war breaking out! For a good hour before the game, each side’s fans hurled slurs at each other as their teams warmed up on the field and innocent—and ignored—pairs of Galo and Cruzeiro fans marched around the field holding banners that read “Atlético and Cruzeiro: United for Peace” and “Cruzeiro and Atlético: United to Fight Tuberculosis.” Just before the opening whistle sounded, the upper deck on each side kept with tradition and unfurled their team’s enormous flags, showing the team logo and colors. To the humiliation of Galo fans and much to the delight of Cruzeirenses, the Galo side unfurled its flag upside-down, a HUGE disgrace to their team. Our group joked about how the people responsible for this atrocity would be killed. Sadly, though I don’t know of their fate, this could very well be more than a mere joke.

The game started with Cruzeiro on the attack early, keeping Atlético on its heals for the better part of the first ten minutes. From then on, the quality of offense on both sides dropped dramatically, making the rest of the game an ugly and anticlimactic defensive struggle. The game ended a 0-0 draw, with fans more hushed and disenchanted than I had first envisioned two weeks before. We scurried out as soon as the final whistle blew to beat the crowds. We chilled at the ticket-buyer’s house for a little bit before getting a ride back home, wanting more than anything not to repeat our bus fiasco from earlier that afternoon. On the way home we passed through Praça 7 de Setembro, a downtown square where Galoucura or Mafia Azul meet up after a victory to unofficially “claim” the city. Despite the marked MP presence, the praça was virtually devoid of hostile life.

This morning at school, fans from both sides wore their team colors with pride, each side believing that their team had played less ugly than the other. As I stood chatting with friends outside in the history and geography department courtyard, I watched as a student in a Galo jersey and another in a Cruzeiro jersey were about to cross paths. In a moment of rare Brazilian sportsmanship, instead of a sneer, instead of a verbal jab, instead of merely ignoring each other, the two fans smiled and cocked their heads back, giving each other a low-five as they each walked by the other. If even for a second, and albeit in the calming shade of palm trees in a well-off university campus, all was right in the football world of BH in that moment.

Correction to a Photo Below

2008-03-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine here at PUC-Minas who has been following my blog told me that I got it wrong with this photo:Yes, there is class divide in Brazil. Yes, this divide can be seen in material juxtapositions almost everywhere you look. However, this photo is not one of them. The houses on the hill above the PUC library are not part of a favela, but rather a "middle-class" neighborhood. Favela, I have learned, is not a term that can be thrown around loosely at any conglomeration of multi-colored and capriciously built houses on a hill. Just goes to show that this Gringo has a lot yet to learn. Indeed, if I've learned anything after 5 weeks in this country, it's that this is a country that's always full of surprises.

How to cross the street like a Brazilian

2008-03-07T05:10:00.000-08:00

Every city has at least one intersection where the eternal clash between cars and pedestrians comes to a head, where each one’s determination to reach point B collides—sometimes literally—with one another. There are many such flash points in Iowa City, though none greater than the T-intersection at Iowa Ave. and Clinton St. There, airhead sorority girls and oblivious frat boys—9 out of 10 likely hailing from the Chicagoland burbs—scurrying off to class see a green light in front of them atop a bright orange don’t walk sign and somehow deduce that it is indeed their right to cross, predominantly when traversing east-west between downtown and the Pentacrest. What results is a city planner’s nightmare: traffic on Iowa Ave. gets backed up two blocks because only two cars at best can find a gap between the tide of ignorant jaywalkers in order to finally turn left or right onto Clinton St. It’s any wonder why the third car from the front, the one unable to get through, doesn’t see the white walk sign like a pedestrian sees the car’s green light and justifiably floor it onto Clinton. The problem, of course, is that pedestrians can’t kill cars.

Brazilians would find themselves right at home at the corner of Iowa and Clinton. Even in a car and bus happy city like Belo Horizonte, walk signs—while indeed ideal—are optional. All that matters when crossing the street in Brazil is timing. Rhythm comes natural to Brazilians, and thus it’s no wonder that so many Brazilians can just look at a stream of oncoming cars and know just when and how fast to hit a hole in between them, a la Frogger. Usually this timing is respectful of drivers’ right of way, though often it can be subjective. For instance, in a steadily crawling line of traffic, many a Brazilian will dart in between cars, buses and motorcycles, giving each the standard thumbs up to thank them for unwittingly—and most likely unwillingly—halting their crawl in order for him or her to cross the street.

Really, crossing the street in Brazil is a metaphor for being Brazilian. City-dwelling Brazilians are almost always on the go, and they’re better than even an “I’m wolkin’ heah!”-screaming New Yorker at fending off any impediment standing—or moving at 40 mph—between them and their point B. This culture of disregard goes for fellow pedestrians as well as moving vehicles. When getting on or off a bus along with a dozen other people, you don’t form a single-file line and politely offer to let someone who arrived within a split-second of you to your position in that single-file line to pass in front of you. Instead, you jostle shoulder-to-shoulder, bottlenecking up or down the steps of the bus so quickly that you’re in your seat or a few stops away from your stop before you realize exactly how you got into your eventual single-file position. On crowded streets and even more crowded shopping malls, when you’re about to cross paths or bump into someone, they move out of your way, you keep on truckin. Indeed, life in Brazil is a contact sport.

It’s not just with physical point B’s that Brazilians practice this culture of disregard. In fact, such a culture is at its finest when Brazilians are trying to reach some agenda that they’ve made up their mind cannot be left unfulfilled. To be Brazilian is to have a sense of malandragrem, which translates into something not so wicked as wickedness, yet not quite as innocent and childlike as mischief. To be a malandro is to have a willingness to take advantage of or in someway profit off of your fellow human being. For instance, a few days after I arrived here I mentioned to the Vice-President of the BH Rotary Club that I’d like to teach English somewhere if I could. She told me she had a friend who ran a small school that needed a teacher to start that next week. She said it was very close to where I lived and it would be really easy—hardly any real teaching would be involved, I’d just have to follow along in the book with the students, who would buy books of their own. Turns out the school is 45 minutes away by bus, and the students still haven’t bought any books, which means I have to improvise out of my teacher’s manual for each hour-and-a-half class twice a week. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing it! The point here is that to help out her friend get to his point B, the club VP softened reality a little bit.

Another example of Brazilian malandragem is piracy. Yes, just as in the U.S., piracy of CDs and DVDs is illegal. The difference is that here the law is hardly ever enforced. A block from my apartment, right in front of the PUC-Minas campus, on a main street that sees a police care drive by at least once or twice an hour, a woman has set up her shop of a vast selection of pirated CDs and DVDs. A few blocks down the road, another guy has done the same. They were there the day I arrived. They are still there. One day I walked by the female pirate with some friends from my class, and they both stopped and pawed through her wares for a few minutes. They didn’t buy anything, but they treated her business as they would any other normal business that legitimately acquired its stock. Here, the Point B of the Brazilian people is to be entertained, and they won’t let the $20-30 pricetag of a retail store stand in their way. Last week I watched the recent smash hit Brazilian film Tropa de Elite (“Elite Squad”) with Ricardo in the apartment of our sweet old nextdoor neighbor Dona Dirce. This sweet old woman, who wouldn’t harm a fly and who wouldn’t think about robbing anyone, had bought a pirated copy of the film. Ricardo later told me how much he detested this aspect of Brazilian culture, and how he believed that by undercutting the entertainment industry through this broad daylight black market, the country would be hamstrung from ever experiencing vast growth in this sector. Really, I shouldn’t be so critical. CD ripping and burning has become just as institutionalized in U.S. culture as it is here. The difference is that the average American will rip and burn to give to friends freely, and buy movies and music through either online or instore retail outlets. Only a small fringe delves into the black market to either buy or sell pirated movies or music. Here, if you want to buy Tropa de Elite, you don’t go to the video store, you go down the block and visit your friendly neighborhood pirate. Deftly dodging traffic along the way.

Photos of my tropical campus

2008-02-29T18:04:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-28T14:29:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-21T05:57:00.000-08:00

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!)

2008-02-14T06:26:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-02-11T07:39:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-08T04:43:00.000-08:00

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!

2008 - A year unlike any other

2008-01-14T21:16:00.000-08:00

Ready...Set... Well, maybe not exactly, but, GO! 2008 is here. It has been for a bit over a month now. One of the two months I'll end up spending in the United States this calendar year. Tomorrow, February 4th, the year 2008 will forever become synonymous to me with "away," "adventure," "excitement," "discovery," "challenge," "apprehension," "longing."

"Brazil."

In early 2005, after returning from a semester in Spain, I knew my life would not be complete without spending a significant amount of time abroad after graduating college. In June 2006 I knew I would get such an opportunity after becoming a lucky recipient of a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship that would send me abroad for an academic year. Three weeks after that announcement, I left to spend the remainder of my northern hemisphere summer amid the lilting voices of the colorful (literally and figuratively) people of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. It didn't take too many days in this place where speaking felt like singing and breathing felt like dancing for my one-and-a-half-years-into-the-future self to realize it had found its home. So, from my arrival date of February 5th to my December 6th departure, I will represent the Iowa City AM Rotary Club of District 6000 while studying Brazilian history and geography at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Rotary District 4520.

When I tell people I'm going to live in Brazil, I know I'm evoking one or more of the montage of images in the January 1 post below. For many, the scantily clad women of Carnaval, or the seemingly genetic deftness and grace of Brazilian soccer stars like Ronaldinho come to mind. Others see visions of the country's iconic favelas, forever imprinted in American minds thanks both to international news and to films such as City of God and Bus 174, or other images emblematic of Brazil's racial and class disparities that are at the same time overt and subtle. The more erudite may see the almost constantly smiling face of current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or simply Lula, as he is called (which, incidentally, means Squid - at least our president is named after a shrub...), and cite him as further evidence of a Latin America that has veered almost collectively to the the left in the wake of the United States' war on terror.

Whether plucked from international headlines or skimmed out of stereotype, the truth is that each one of the images below, any one of the images I may plant in people's minds, is merely the tip of a continent-sized iceberg. Even I, who have become a supposed expert on this land that will soon be my home, have delved only slightly below its surface thus far. But soon that will change, and with it, I hope, the understanding of those who would take the plunge with me. The ultimate goal of the Ambassadorial Scholarship is to spread goodwill and foster mutual understanding between the people of your home and host countries. My first mission of course will be to channel Iowa and the United States through me and into the hearts of my hosts. But as far as bringing Brazil back home is concerned, I plan to do so through two of my greatest passions: photography and writing. Through my photographs I hope to fill the minds of my compatriots with fresh and intriguing images of Brazil, whetting their appetite with the first chapter of a novel that can't be passed up. Through my writings, both here and in a more extensive work, I hope to tell - as best as I can in 10 months - the full story of a country and a people that deserve to be known beneath the mere surface.

I invite you, the reader who I have invited here or who has stumbled upon me by internet accident, to follow me here as I tell the story of what I discover in my new home, in its past, in its future, in the soul of its people, and in my own soul as it bends and grooves like a samba dancer in its every encounter with this polyrhythmic land.

As I slowly put things in and out of my suitcase, anxiously await 80-degree weather, and dream of what dreams a night under the Southern Cross may bring, I can't help but think of the people who have helped to bring me to this point. I am nothing without all of you. The debt I owe you for sculpting me I feel I could only repay by taking each and every one of you down to South America with me. I'll try my hardest to do the next best thing: to show to everyone I meet a face that is a reflection of all of your faces, a face that shows that a country that has sadly become so maligned in the minds of many in our world can still produce a vessel of goodwill crafted by thousands of hands. Thank you all for all you have contributed to my life. I promise none of it will go spoiled.

I know it's late, but Happy 2008 to everyone! I know it will be a year unlike any other for all of us!

2008-01-01T15:15:00.000-08:00