Xmas weekend part 1 (of 3)
I made a characteristically half-baked attempt to sum up my weekend, and came up with nothing, so I’ll try to paraphrase here to spare you the details if you don’t want to read more (I’m sure you won’t. The details are for my own purposes of documentation). But even before that let me meta-paraphrase: Did you ever see the Seinfeld episode where Kramer moves to LA and ends up as an extra in a hard-rock music video, and is dancing around crazily like an uncoordinated lunatic with a bunch of young people? That was my weekend, except most of the people were my age. But there was lots of crazy dancing and my hair was sticking out most of the time.
I left to go help with a Christmas party and new school opening for poor folks in the interior of Bahia, a place which gives "middle of nowhere" a new meaning, thinking that I’d be back to go to another Christmas party on Saturday night with a (woman-but-not-girl-)friend. This involved (not at the time to my knowledge) a 6 hour drive out there in Ivanildo’s car, a 12-hour (!) bus ride back, two nights sleeping over first at Ivanildo’s apartment and then at his mother’s house in the "city" of Central (pronounced "sentrow"), along with about 30 of his closest relatives. Additionally, nearly all of my female coworkers who range from age 25-35 and also went. During the course of 3 or so days we went from being acquaintances who wouldn’t talk to each other unless absolutely necessary to being very good friends. I am thrilled with this new development and at the same time sadly preoccupied with how difficult it will now be to say goodbye when I leave in March. And not only did I totally miss my party appointment with my friend, but it turns out that she had changed our plans while I was gone from "meeting to go to a party in Barra" to "a (Christmas) weekend overnight stay in a resort town which may or may not included us sharing a room." I’m sure you’re thinking what I’m thinking, i.e., WHAT THE F?
I am nearly positive that Ivanildo asked me if I wanted to come help him out on Friday with the party he was helping put on for these folks in Central. Later he mentioned we’d have to leave on Thursday night to get there in time, and I was fine with that. I didn’t realize until I got to work on Thursday (and he didn’t elaborate until then, I’m sure on purpose) that I would be staying at his apartment (his wife and 3 kids were already in Central) Thursday overnight, and that we would be getting up at 4 am to make the (again, 6-hour) drive out there, along with Adriana, one of our coworkers. Nor did I realize that Ivanildo was going on a 4+ day jaunt all over the state of Bahia, covering something on the order of 1000 miles, in order to oversee Christmas activities at all of their community centers. He had to have known that I had no idea I was signing up for this whole thing, and for this reason explained it in detail when I got to work on Thursday. I explained to him that I had to be back on Saturday (this was true) because just that (Thursday) morning I had confirmed with one of the women I got set up with by my Portuguese school to "practice language study" that I would meet her in my neighborhood (Barra) on Saturday night.
And speaking of practicing language study, there have been two times that one of the administrative coordinators at my language school has told me she has someone who would like to meet with me on a semi-regular basis to "practice English with a native speaker." Presumably I would also be able to practice my Portuguese with a native speaker, so I was all for it. But I am now in favor of calling this practice what it is: pimping. Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not complaining. The most recent "language student" is a young and attractive woman who I went out with (on a date – let’s also just call that what it was) and spoke Portuguese the whole time. I was even a little bit forceful about making some attempt to speak English but she wasn’t into it. Which from the learning point of view is fine with me because it’s a great way for me to learn Portuguese. But we’re no longer meeting for the reason we were intentionally hooked up (heh) for. So it’s pimping, and I’m the whore. I guess we all knew this anyway, so it’s probably not such a remarkable revelation.
(Brief diversion / explanation: Ivanildo is the boss (some people call him "chefe", which is the Portuguese equivalent), if you could call him that, at the place where I "work", which is to mean I volunteer to work there. It’s nice because I can’t get fired and no one can really tell me what to do. Or they can tell me what to do but I’m under no real obligation to do it. In one very small and non-airconditioned office are me, Ivanildo, and Vinny, Ivanildo’s either cousin or nephew, who likes extremely bad 80s-style hairband metal from Europe, where apparently it’s making some sort of comeback or never left. In the other bigger room, which is airconditioned, are about 8 women in cubicles who solicit donations over the phone, listen to music, and do pretty much whatever else they want. These include Adriana, Marcia (MAH – sha), Elaine (ee – LINE – uh), and four other women whose names I don’t remember and feel like an asshole (and should) for not remembering. I have huge crushes on at least 3 of them, and all of them went to Central on a big rented bus with a TV/DVD player except for Marcia and one whose name I don’t know but she rides a motorcycle to and back from work.)
So the chefe and I drove out to his place which is on the outskirts of Salvador and which is probably one of the poorest neighborhoods I’ve ever spent the night anywhere. This is remarkable because for Salvador the quality of the neighborhood was actually pretty good. Across a river is Castelo Branco which has many residents who are near-starvation poor. Ivanildo remarked somewhat emotionally how disturbing it was to him that people in his neighborhood were doing fine but just across the river, well within sight, there were people living destitute lives with few people who seemed to care about them. He didn’t say a word, or I’m guessing even think, about the rich families scattered around Salvador who live in apartments most New Yorkers would be jealous of and who drive expensive Mercedes or Audi cars in a city which has a huge problem with poverty and its symptoms – lack of education, drug use, street children.
Ivanildo had told me his wife and kids had left for Central a while back, so it was surprising when he buzzed the door to his building and a woman’s voice answered and let us in. We walked to an apartment door which had a Compton-style jail grille door which had to be unbolted after the real door was opened. And it was Elaine who answered it, which was also surprising. She was cooking us dinner and had been arranging some of the boxes of toys that were scattered around the place. Ivanildo’s apartment was small and in disarray, but in my opinion not entirely out of the ordinary for what you would expect from a lower-middle-class family of 5 who have neither the time nor desire to fix the many little things that were sort of falling apart as things in tenement apartments tend to do. For instance, you had to flush the toilet by pulling up on a wire that was visible through a hole in the wall above the toilet where there had clearly been a knob of some sort but which apparently broke and someone decided to just remove.
Ivanildo apologized for the condition of his apartment and I waved my hand to show how little I cared. He then showed me where I’d be sleeping, which was a small room with a kids bed and which was fine with me except it was a little hot. I opened the window a little but not so much that I thought someone could get their hand through the security grate, the window, and down to my neck while I was sleeping on the bed. Ivanildo then led me back and urged me to sit down at the little formica or whatever dining table in his living room.
I will eat anything except raw onions, and there are even exceptions to that rule at times. For some reason people assume I’m a picky eater, maybe because I’m thin, and when Elaine brought out the food, which consisted of beans, rice, pork, and spaghetti with sauce, Ivanildo asked me if it was OK and I was like, "Yeah, sure" and didn’t even pause to offer it to anyone else before I started helping myself when he was like "Because, you know, we can get you something else if you don’t like it." And I said "No, really, I’m fine (and would you just let me please start stuffing my face)." But he still seemed to think I was just being nice by eating it, which I was not.
I didn’t know how old Elaine was at this point but I found out later that she is 29. Her skin is the darkest African-looking black and she has a raspy voice. Like all Bahians, particularly the women, she sings more than speaks when she talks. She has a perfect body and clearly not a knockout-beautiful face but I think she’s attractive regardless. In the office she had made a few attempts before to talk to me, even though I understood little of what she said and vice-versa. She seemed to get a little easily frustrated at our communication problems, but I could tell that for her to make an effort like this was significant, and that I appreciated very much. She too said things that made me think she thought I was wolfing the food down in order to make everyone feel better rather than because I really liked it. For this reason I told her afterwards, when we were alone in the kitchen, that her food was the best I’d eaten in the 7 weeks I’d been in Bahia. I realized as I was saying this that this was a total lie, and that what I’d meant to say is that it was the best home-cooked meal I’d had there and way better than what I usually ate, but I have a very limited vocabulary. I think she liked me before, but this sealed the deal, and though she said I was lying I could tell that this flattered the crap out of her, and hey, that’s cool.
A little later her sister and a friend of Ivanildo’s (whose name is either Tomas or Marciano or something like that) came by. I didn’t get until later that they weren’t a couple and just came by coincidentally at the same time.
Later when Elaine explained it all to me the dialog was like this.
ME: Ohhhh, I see, that’s your sister.
ELAINE: Yeah, what did you think I said when I introduced her as my sister?
ME: I was just smiling and nodding and saying ‘Sim’ (Yes). I don’t understand a word of Portuguese.
ELAINE: Oh yeah.
We did, of course, have this conversation in Portuguese. No one on this whole trip spoke English except Ivanildo’s brother Luciano later on when we had a little powwow. I’m so psyched to have been able to use that word in a sentence. Those of you who know why will understand my wretched despicament.
We then used Ivanildo’s VW Golf-sized non-Golf model VW to move a bunch of boxes of toys from his building to the rented bus which was parked down the street (it couldn’t make it through the dirt road to his building). There I found most of my other coworkers loading themselves onto the bus and a Scorpions Live Acoustic DVD into the bus’ player. I don’t think anyone except Vinny liked Scorpions but they didn’t have anything else – I think the DVD was donated for reasons which don’t need explaining here.
Ivanildo and then went back to his place and hit the sack, at around midnight. At 4am I woke up to see Adriana shuffling around the hallway to load some more stuff into the car. Adriana has long braided hair with brown highlights and a look on her face like the earth could crack in two and she would still be unfazed. Before this weekend she was polite and said hi to me, but I sort of felt like to her I in my unfamiliarity with the language and the organization was just an obstacle to getting whatever it was she needed done, along with the rest of the world.
We headed out and I fell asleep in the back. The terrain alternated between tall grass with scattered bushes and low trees, and what I guess you would call forested hills with visible red soil where the road cut through them. I could tell we were getting far from civilization by measure of what I like to call the "donkey index", which is the ratio of donkeys to people in a particular area. The road was mostly asphalt but some of it was dirt, mostly where there was construction being done. There was also about a 10-mile stretch of asphalt road that was so ridden with an archipelago of massive potholes that Ivanildo had to slalom between either side of the road and alternately brake and nail the gas to make good time. As we passed some villages, there were speed bumps along the way to slow down the traffic. One of these Ivanildo nailed at at least 30mph, and luckily I was watching and saw it coming and ducked so I wouldn’t get knocked out cold from hitting my head on the ceiling of the not-Golf.
We stopped at a gas station and I switched with Adriana in the front. Ivanildo offered to let me drive but I said I was OK. I then realized he might be tired and I asked him this but he said no so I went back to sleep.
We arrived in the city of Central around 10:30, surprisingly good time. I don’t know how many people live there but I’m guessing it’s at least 10,000, maybe a lot more. It’s a lot like pictures I’ve seen of other cities (notably Lencois) in the interior of Bahia. The houses and buildings are for the most part a single story, and are all built adjacent to each other with few if any spaces between them. The roads are light brown-red brick and the buildings look like white or red clay. Maybe a little bit like a Clint Eastwood western, but that doesn’t quite describe it either. I’ll post a picture.
I didn’t know until we were at his mom’s doorstep that this was Ivanildo’s hometown. He then proceeded to introduce me to the 10 of the 30 aforementioned relatives, none of whose names I remembered. His mom, who I think is a widow, is very well-preserved and the matriarch of the family. I’m not just saying that to sound literary. People called her Dona Rita, which of course invokes a Godfather kind of air to the whole thing.
And come to think of it (and I’m not just saying this to sound funny, although it might be funny anyway), when she offered me her hand, I shook it but grabbed it in a way that I got just the top of her wrist. I thought this was because either she had some kind of deformity or her hand was wet and didn’t want me to get wet, but I wonder now if she was holding it out to for me to kiss it. Ooops.
Ivanildo showed me all over the place – his parents’ house, the backyard, and the new school which was right down the road. Among other things it will be one of the first public, free Internet-wired buildings in the town. It was very noticeably renovated, which I think is intentional as a sort of psychological thing to make people feel better about the neighborhood. The big problem for the people of this town and nearly the entire state of Bahia is that they have an agrarian society which is unfortunately very subject to drought and is therefore very unstable economically. In recent years people have found it much harder to scrape a living out of the land because of the increasing number of droughts and competition from corporate and world-economy farms. Ivanildo and his brother’s organization has as one of its goals an effort to find an alternate source of income for people across the region, in addition to boosting education and marketable job skills.
A few of my female coworkers, and a couple others who I hadn’t met, were busy wrapping presents in one of the large rooms of the school. I, being little more than luggage for the bulk of the trip, volunteered to help out, and Ivanildo, to my disappointment, hesitated for about 0.01 seconds before unloading me there like a sack of busted bricks. I wrapped about 5 trucks and a couple other things, and helped gather the trash together before we were done. I was a little slow, due to my language handicap. I didn’t know how to say "invisible tape" until I was stuck without it, at which point I learned that the Portuguese word for it is "durex" (no trouble remembering that one).
We were about to head back to the house but Elaine suggested that we check out the town. So we went – me, three or so women, Ivanildo’s son of about 10 who is also named "Mateus" (my name in Portuguese), and his friend from the night before who will heretofore be referred to as Tomas. He’s a professor of philosophy and sociology in Salvador (not sure which school – Salvador has at least 3 unversities). We wandered around a little before coming up on one of the ubiquitous bars that pepper the cities and towns of Bahia. These consist of a house-sized, single-story building with an open front wall and five or six plastic tables surrounded by plastic chairs. The bar itself is plywood since most people sit at chairs or sometimes stand at the bar if they’re coming in for a quick shot (one guy did this while we were there, looked like he had some miles on him). After sitting down for a while and not understanding a thing anyone was saying (and, incidentally, not really caring) I heard my name come up and realized they were talking about my language skills. One of the women from the office who is very quiet but whom I like a lot, because she’s very nice and I think she gets a lot of work done, said something to the effect of "He speaks pretty well but he doesn’t understand a damn thing." I wasn’t insulted by this (it being quite accurate) but was rather flattered by the revelation that she a) knew I existed, and b) had been paying enough attention to what little I said in Portuguese to make a pretty astute observation about my lack of language skills.
(to be continued in the next post ...)
I left to go help with a Christmas party and new school opening for poor folks in the interior of Bahia, a place which gives "middle of nowhere" a new meaning, thinking that I’d be back to go to another Christmas party on Saturday night with a (woman-but-not-girl-)friend. This involved (not at the time to my knowledge) a 6 hour drive out there in Ivanildo’s car, a 12-hour (!) bus ride back, two nights sleeping over first at Ivanildo’s apartment and then at his mother’s house in the "city" of Central (pronounced "sentrow"), along with about 30 of his closest relatives. Additionally, nearly all of my female coworkers who range from age 25-35 and also went. During the course of 3 or so days we went from being acquaintances who wouldn’t talk to each other unless absolutely necessary to being very good friends. I am thrilled with this new development and at the same time sadly preoccupied with how difficult it will now be to say goodbye when I leave in March. And not only did I totally miss my party appointment with my friend, but it turns out that she had changed our plans while I was gone from "meeting to go to a party in Barra" to "a (Christmas) weekend overnight stay in a resort town which may or may not included us sharing a room." I’m sure you’re thinking what I’m thinking, i.e., WHAT THE F?
I am nearly positive that Ivanildo asked me if I wanted to come help him out on Friday with the party he was helping put on for these folks in Central. Later he mentioned we’d have to leave on Thursday night to get there in time, and I was fine with that. I didn’t realize until I got to work on Thursday (and he didn’t elaborate until then, I’m sure on purpose) that I would be staying at his apartment (his wife and 3 kids were already in Central) Thursday overnight, and that we would be getting up at 4 am to make the (again, 6-hour) drive out there, along with Adriana, one of our coworkers. Nor did I realize that Ivanildo was going on a 4+ day jaunt all over the state of Bahia, covering something on the order of 1000 miles, in order to oversee Christmas activities at all of their community centers. He had to have known that I had no idea I was signing up for this whole thing, and for this reason explained it in detail when I got to work on Thursday. I explained to him that I had to be back on Saturday (this was true) because just that (Thursday) morning I had confirmed with one of the women I got set up with by my Portuguese school to "practice language study" that I would meet her in my neighborhood (Barra) on Saturday night.
And speaking of practicing language study, there have been two times that one of the administrative coordinators at my language school has told me she has someone who would like to meet with me on a semi-regular basis to "practice English with a native speaker." Presumably I would also be able to practice my Portuguese with a native speaker, so I was all for it. But I am now in favor of calling this practice what it is: pimping. Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not complaining. The most recent "language student" is a young and attractive woman who I went out with (on a date – let’s also just call that what it was) and spoke Portuguese the whole time. I was even a little bit forceful about making some attempt to speak English but she wasn’t into it. Which from the learning point of view is fine with me because it’s a great way for me to learn Portuguese. But we’re no longer meeting for the reason we were intentionally hooked up (heh) for. So it’s pimping, and I’m the whore. I guess we all knew this anyway, so it’s probably not such a remarkable revelation.
(Brief diversion / explanation: Ivanildo is the boss (some people call him "chefe", which is the Portuguese equivalent), if you could call him that, at the place where I "work", which is to mean I volunteer to work there. It’s nice because I can’t get fired and no one can really tell me what to do. Or they can tell me what to do but I’m under no real obligation to do it. In one very small and non-airconditioned office are me, Ivanildo, and Vinny, Ivanildo’s either cousin or nephew, who likes extremely bad 80s-style hairband metal from Europe, where apparently it’s making some sort of comeback or never left. In the other bigger room, which is airconditioned, are about 8 women in cubicles who solicit donations over the phone, listen to music, and do pretty much whatever else they want. These include Adriana, Marcia (MAH – sha), Elaine (ee – LINE – uh), and four other women whose names I don’t remember and feel like an asshole (and should) for not remembering. I have huge crushes on at least 3 of them, and all of them went to Central on a big rented bus with a TV/DVD player except for Marcia and one whose name I don’t know but she rides a motorcycle to and back from work.)
So the chefe and I drove out to his place which is on the outskirts of Salvador and which is probably one of the poorest neighborhoods I’ve ever spent the night anywhere. This is remarkable because for Salvador the quality of the neighborhood was actually pretty good. Across a river is Castelo Branco which has many residents who are near-starvation poor. Ivanildo remarked somewhat emotionally how disturbing it was to him that people in his neighborhood were doing fine but just across the river, well within sight, there were people living destitute lives with few people who seemed to care about them. He didn’t say a word, or I’m guessing even think, about the rich families scattered around Salvador who live in apartments most New Yorkers would be jealous of and who drive expensive Mercedes or Audi cars in a city which has a huge problem with poverty and its symptoms – lack of education, drug use, street children.
Ivanildo had told me his wife and kids had left for Central a while back, so it was surprising when he buzzed the door to his building and a woman’s voice answered and let us in. We walked to an apartment door which had a Compton-style jail grille door which had to be unbolted after the real door was opened. And it was Elaine who answered it, which was also surprising. She was cooking us dinner and had been arranging some of the boxes of toys that were scattered around the place. Ivanildo’s apartment was small and in disarray, but in my opinion not entirely out of the ordinary for what you would expect from a lower-middle-class family of 5 who have neither the time nor desire to fix the many little things that were sort of falling apart as things in tenement apartments tend to do. For instance, you had to flush the toilet by pulling up on a wire that was visible through a hole in the wall above the toilet where there had clearly been a knob of some sort but which apparently broke and someone decided to just remove.
Ivanildo apologized for the condition of his apartment and I waved my hand to show how little I cared. He then showed me where I’d be sleeping, which was a small room with a kids bed and which was fine with me except it was a little hot. I opened the window a little but not so much that I thought someone could get their hand through the security grate, the window, and down to my neck while I was sleeping on the bed. Ivanildo then led me back and urged me to sit down at the little formica or whatever dining table in his living room.
I will eat anything except raw onions, and there are even exceptions to that rule at times. For some reason people assume I’m a picky eater, maybe because I’m thin, and when Elaine brought out the food, which consisted of beans, rice, pork, and spaghetti with sauce, Ivanildo asked me if it was OK and I was like, "Yeah, sure" and didn’t even pause to offer it to anyone else before I started helping myself when he was like "Because, you know, we can get you something else if you don’t like it." And I said "No, really, I’m fine (and would you just let me please start stuffing my face)." But he still seemed to think I was just being nice by eating it, which I was not.
I didn’t know how old Elaine was at this point but I found out later that she is 29. Her skin is the darkest African-looking black and she has a raspy voice. Like all Bahians, particularly the women, she sings more than speaks when she talks. She has a perfect body and clearly not a knockout-beautiful face but I think she’s attractive regardless. In the office she had made a few attempts before to talk to me, even though I understood little of what she said and vice-versa. She seemed to get a little easily frustrated at our communication problems, but I could tell that for her to make an effort like this was significant, and that I appreciated very much. She too said things that made me think she thought I was wolfing the food down in order to make everyone feel better rather than because I really liked it. For this reason I told her afterwards, when we were alone in the kitchen, that her food was the best I’d eaten in the 7 weeks I’d been in Bahia. I realized as I was saying this that this was a total lie, and that what I’d meant to say is that it was the best home-cooked meal I’d had there and way better than what I usually ate, but I have a very limited vocabulary. I think she liked me before, but this sealed the deal, and though she said I was lying I could tell that this flattered the crap out of her, and hey, that’s cool.
A little later her sister and a friend of Ivanildo’s (whose name is either Tomas or Marciano or something like that) came by. I didn’t get until later that they weren’t a couple and just came by coincidentally at the same time.
Later when Elaine explained it all to me the dialog was like this.
ME: Ohhhh, I see, that’s your sister.
ELAINE: Yeah, what did you think I said when I introduced her as my sister?
ME: I was just smiling and nodding and saying ‘Sim’ (Yes). I don’t understand a word of Portuguese.
ELAINE: Oh yeah.
We did, of course, have this conversation in Portuguese. No one on this whole trip spoke English except Ivanildo’s brother Luciano later on when we had a little powwow. I’m so psyched to have been able to use that word in a sentence. Those of you who know why will understand my wretched despicament.
We then used Ivanildo’s VW Golf-sized non-Golf model VW to move a bunch of boxes of toys from his building to the rented bus which was parked down the street (it couldn’t make it through the dirt road to his building). There I found most of my other coworkers loading themselves onto the bus and a Scorpions Live Acoustic DVD into the bus’ player. I don’t think anyone except Vinny liked Scorpions but they didn’t have anything else – I think the DVD was donated for reasons which don’t need explaining here.
Ivanildo and then went back to his place and hit the sack, at around midnight. At 4am I woke up to see Adriana shuffling around the hallway to load some more stuff into the car. Adriana has long braided hair with brown highlights and a look on her face like the earth could crack in two and she would still be unfazed. Before this weekend she was polite and said hi to me, but I sort of felt like to her I in my unfamiliarity with the language and the organization was just an obstacle to getting whatever it was she needed done, along with the rest of the world.
We headed out and I fell asleep in the back. The terrain alternated between tall grass with scattered bushes and low trees, and what I guess you would call forested hills with visible red soil where the road cut through them. I could tell we were getting far from civilization by measure of what I like to call the "donkey index", which is the ratio of donkeys to people in a particular area. The road was mostly asphalt but some of it was dirt, mostly where there was construction being done. There was also about a 10-mile stretch of asphalt road that was so ridden with an archipelago of massive potholes that Ivanildo had to slalom between either side of the road and alternately brake and nail the gas to make good time. As we passed some villages, there were speed bumps along the way to slow down the traffic. One of these Ivanildo nailed at at least 30mph, and luckily I was watching and saw it coming and ducked so I wouldn’t get knocked out cold from hitting my head on the ceiling of the not-Golf.
We stopped at a gas station and I switched with Adriana in the front. Ivanildo offered to let me drive but I said I was OK. I then realized he might be tired and I asked him this but he said no so I went back to sleep.
We arrived in the city of Central around 10:30, surprisingly good time. I don’t know how many people live there but I’m guessing it’s at least 10,000, maybe a lot more. It’s a lot like pictures I’ve seen of other cities (notably Lencois) in the interior of Bahia. The houses and buildings are for the most part a single story, and are all built adjacent to each other with few if any spaces between them. The roads are light brown-red brick and the buildings look like white or red clay. Maybe a little bit like a Clint Eastwood western, but that doesn’t quite describe it either. I’ll post a picture.I didn’t know until we were at his mom’s doorstep that this was Ivanildo’s hometown. He then proceeded to introduce me to the 10 of the 30 aforementioned relatives, none of whose names I remembered. His mom, who I think is a widow, is very well-preserved and the matriarch of the family. I’m not just saying that to sound literary. People called her Dona Rita, which of course invokes a Godfather kind of air to the whole thing.
And come to think of it (and I’m not just saying this to sound funny, although it might be funny anyway), when she offered me her hand, I shook it but grabbed it in a way that I got just the top of her wrist. I thought this was because either she had some kind of deformity or her hand was wet and didn’t want me to get wet, but I wonder now if she was holding it out to for me to kiss it. Ooops.
Ivanildo showed me all over the place – his parents’ house, the backyard, and the new school which was right down the road. Among other things it will be one of the first public, free Internet-wired buildings in the town. It was very noticeably renovated, which I think is intentional as a sort of psychological thing to make people feel better about the neighborhood. The big problem for the people of this town and nearly the entire state of Bahia is that they have an agrarian society which is unfortunately very subject to drought and is therefore very unstable economically. In recent years people have found it much harder to scrape a living out of the land because of the increasing number of droughts and competition from corporate and world-economy farms. Ivanildo and his brother’s organization has as one of its goals an effort to find an alternate source of income for people across the region, in addition to boosting education and marketable job skills.A few of my female coworkers, and a couple others who I hadn’t met, were busy wrapping presents in one of the large rooms of the school. I, being little more than luggage for the bulk of the trip, volunteered to help out, and Ivanildo, to my disappointment, hesitated for about 0.01 seconds before unloading me there like a sack of busted bricks. I wrapped about 5 trucks and a couple other things, and helped gather the trash together before we were done. I was a little slow, due to my language handicap. I didn’t know how to say "invisible tape" until I was stuck without it, at which point I learned that the Portuguese word for it is "durex" (no trouble remembering that one).
We were about to head back to the house but Elaine suggested that we check out the town. So we went – me, three or so women, Ivanildo’s son of about 10 who is also named "Mateus" (my name in Portuguese), and his friend from the night before who will heretofore be referred to as Tomas. He’s a professor of philosophy and sociology in Salvador (not sure which school – Salvador has at least 3 unversities). We wandered around a little before coming up on one of the ubiquitous bars that pepper the cities and towns of Bahia. These consist of a house-sized, single-story building with an open front wall and five or six plastic tables surrounded by plastic chairs. The bar itself is plywood since most people sit at chairs or sometimes stand at the bar if they’re coming in for a quick shot (one guy did this while we were there, looked like he had some miles on him). After sitting down for a while and not understanding a thing anyone was saying (and, incidentally, not really caring) I heard my name come up and realized they were talking about my language skills. One of the women from the office who is very quiet but whom I like a lot, because she’s very nice and I think she gets a lot of work done, said something to the effect of "He speaks pretty well but he doesn’t understand a damn thing." I wasn’t insulted by this (it being quite accurate) but was rather flattered by the revelation that she a) knew I existed, and b) had been paying enough attention to what little I said in Portuguese to make a pretty astute observation about my lack of language skills.
(to be continued in the next post ...)
posted by n10471 at 5:46 AM
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