TRAVELOGUE: Bussed Out

When I left Parauapebas, Pará, I did so knowing that I have only a week left in Brazil and that my only constraint is to arrive in São Paulo with enough time to grab my bags at Dave's apartment and fly back stateside. "Adventure!" I thought. I unfolded my gigantic map of Brazil and began imagining the various sidetracks I could follow, what exciting sights I might find.

Thus began the bussing. I decided to head for the Ilha do Bananal in Tocantins, which has a confluence of cerrado, rainforest, and pantanal ecosystems. An overnight bus later I arrived in the area, but made a decision to head for Jalapão, a very out of the way so-called "secret" of Brazil that features dunes, waterfalls, etc. An afternoon of buses later, I arrived at a good jumping off point, only to find there was no ride to the area until the following day. Rather than pass the night twiddling my thumbs, I scanned the map again and made a trajectory correction, catching an overnight bus to Alto Paraíso de Goiás, where I hoped to do some hiking in the highland cerrado and enjoy a hippie vibe.

I got dropped off at 5am with absolutely no clue as to city orientation, and being a small sleepy town, I went to a park and laid out on a bench to watch the sunrise. A flock of unexpected toucans flew overhead. A slim crescent of moon rose over the false dawn horizon before the sun made its way up. I got up and found the bus station, only to discover that buses into the national park weren't leaving until the afternoon. Over açai, I decided that my last week in Brazil should be about culture, not nature. A couple hours later I was bound for Brasília, where after a few hours (including a stop in the space-age looking national cathedral and some amazing baba ganoush) I caught an overnight bus here to Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. I am now twenty minutes from my bus to Ouro Preto, where I will comence being a tourist.

All told, I've spent 47 of the last 68 hours in one or another bus. I have developed "bus butt," the dull aching in my cocyx, and "bus brain," the ability to zone out for hours on end. A six hour ride no longer seems daunting--in fact, quite trivial. Overnight buses, my previous nemesis, I now grudingly accept (and enjoy the ability of not having to pay for a hotel room). However, I haven't slept in a prone position for three nights now, and it's been seven nights since I slept in a bed. I got rings around my eyes like nothing else.

So I'm looking forward to a few restful days in colonial gold mining towns. More to come.

TRAVELOGUE: Empty Days and Full Stomach in Belem

[This was written a week ago.]

Today was a four-coconut day. I ran around from morning to night practically without stop in the hot, humid Belém sun. Thank goodness you can crack open an iced coconut on pratically any street corner for less than the price of water.

Unfortunately, it turns out I arrived in the wrong place; the MST headquarters for Pará state is 10 hours to the south in Marabá, a detail that seemed to never have found mention in my correspondence with them. What followed from this realization was about the most intense 36 hours of indecision in my life:

To go direct to Marabá, or spend some time in the Amazon? Indecision slept upon. Decision made upon waking to forget MST and go to rainforest. Several trips to the travel agent. Expensive flight deep into Amazon let past. Close to buying a boat ride to Santarém. Furious internet research on forest there changes mind. Suddenly find fare to Manaus. Book flight to Manaus. Spend an hour reading of tourist experiences there. Ruminate for an hour or two while walking around zoo, realize that it will be oodles of cash and not the "real" Amazon. Run back to agent to cancel flight. Walk to booking agent to get boat to Macabá. Walk to docks to find schedule since agent is useless. Realize only buses go to Macabá, grab a long ride to bus station. Argue with bus line representative. Come back to room with resolution to grab bus to Impeatriz. Realize that it's Marabá, not Macabá, which explains confusion with boat and bus reps...

...and so tomorrow I have resolved to catch a bus direct to Marabá and do what I originally intended, hang with the MST.

In the meantime, I've killed a couple days in Belém, the major port city at the mouth of the Amazon. Went to zoo and saw all the animals that people pay huge bucks to try to spot in the wild (felt bad for the monkeys and manatee). Wandered through the stalls of the large Ver-o-Peso outdoor market in search of new and fabulous fruits, which there aren't, believe it or not--they only exist in juice and ice cream form (uxí, murucí, araçá, taburucí, etc). Had my fried fish and savory açai--the way it's traditionally eaten, not like the ice cream-esque stuff in Salvador--and it was a weird but nonetheless yummy experience (hope I don't get a protozoa from the water). Looked out over the Amazon, which seems like an ocean. Ate fresh castanhas de Pará, which is how Brazil nuts are called here. Savored the pato de tucupi, a stewed duck in a broth flavored with spinach-like jambu leaf. Chowed filhote, the meatiest freshwater fish in the world, like chicken.

As you can tell, I've not really done much other than eat and be preoccupied with travel plans. Onward!

TRAVELOGUE: A Maranhense Dream, Part I: Sao Luis

[This was written a couple weeks ago, more to follow shortly (I hope).]

I began writing this entry a long time ago, the first line being, "I already know I won't have enough time to spend here, that I'll leave wanting more." Quite true still. São Luís is what I had expected Salvador to be, and where I wish I'd spent more time.

The city is actually on an island, or series of islands, bathed in Atlantic tides that vary greatly and leave behind afternoon tidal flats reflecting the equatorial sun. Like Salvador, the historical center is the main tourist depot, and the city's modern development spreads north and west along the beach-lined coast. The people are a gloriously multiethnic bunch, owing to the mixture of Portuguese, African, and indigenous peoples--the latter being more pronounced here than anywhere I'd been previously.

The historical center, unlike Salvador's Pelourinho, actually feels historical due to the number of rundown, as-yet-to-be-renovated buildings. It is not uncommon to see a kudzu-like overgrowth wrapping itself around exposed brick and bombed-out looking windows, and I was surprised to espy people living and working inside buildings that were either boarded up or missing a large chunk of wall of roof. Those buildings that are in good shape often show off pretty 18th-century tile façades (or renovations thereof) that, combined with the poorly-draining cobblestone streets and alleys, properly summon visions of colonial times. As seems to be requisite for cities in Brasil, steep hills figure well into the topography, but thankfully distances are short.



And while the tourism industry is developed and running the show, the Projeto Reviver (as people still call it) manages to remain the province of locals just as much as of tourists. A small marketplace still operates out of the center, and regular nightlife is neatly confined to a few central blocks, tapering off rather quickly in all directions. Crowded in the evenings, the area empties pretty thoroughly by wee hours and remains without foot traffic during the day on weekends, which combined with the absence of cars (by law), makes for a surprising tranquility. Not even beggars show up; come to think of it, I don't think I was approached more than once or twice for money in the week and a half I was there.

Perhaps it is the heat that keeps things slow; just two degrees inside the southern hemisphere, São Luís is constantly on a low simmer. Yet, as the sun goes down, outdoor cafes and restaurants become packed and the entire population of the Reviver shows up to stroll, to drink, to eat, to dance. Live music (usually guitarists with a vocalist singing MPB) sets up at every corner, so close that often multiple performers' music is heard at once in a melodic chaos! As night goes on, open clubs and outdoor street parties strike up, everything from rock to samba to reggae, all of which usually wraps up by 2am (or 4am on weekends). Every night has energy, and as a result I never really had mornings to speak of.



(Might I add that São Luís is the reggae capital of Brasil, hometown of the most famous Brazilian group Tribo de Jah and host to innumerable reggae festivals and reggae clubs. "Jamaica in Brazil," I heard not a few times. Now how did that happen?)

During these evenings, small booths set up on one walkway to sell trinkets, food, and drink, the highlight being kiosks with an array of traditional Maranhense dishes that offer a plate of five selections for five reais--a deal which I took advantage of every night without exception. To boot, they have microwaves on hand to make sure everything is piping hot! And so I got a quick culinary tour:

Filling Up Maranhense

The most interesting dish was cuxá, a vegetable purée made from the vinegrera leaf (and shrimp, manioc flour, sesame, green onion, coriander, and chilis) that has an earthy, almost tea-like taste. It's surprising in itself since Brazilians seem to be averse to vegetable dishes, and though at first its taste is off-putting, it soon makes sense alongside the rich and succulent seafood dishes that it often accompanies, generally as a flavoring for rice (arroz de cuxá). With it I thoroughly enjoyed the sururu, a mussel casserole, as well as the varieties of fresh shrimp and crab in mash, fried, or casserole form.

All of this, of course, washed down with my new favorite soda: Guaraná Jesús! It's fluorescent pink, named after the Christian Lord, and actually bears a resemblance to the taste of guaraná juice (unlike Antártica). It is also, very sadly, found only in Maranhão state--rumored to have been bought by Coca-Cola but remains wholly local in production and consumption, perhaps due to its eccentric name, color, and flavor.



The other dependency I began in São Luís was the guaraná de amazonia, a ice cream-smoothie-esque concoction of cashews, peanuts, catuaba (powder from a tree bark, stimulant), milk, ice, fruits (papaya, banana, and avocado being my usual), and copious amounts of guaraná in both powder and sugary syrup form. In fact, I chose my pousada based primarily on the fact that my favorite fixer, Julia, operated from the storefront down below. Despite being probably quite unhealthy, I accepted it enthusiastically as a surrogate for a real breakfast.



I also increased my risk of diabetes by devouring delicious chocolate cake with a filling of bacuri, a fruit that complements chocolate like an extremely apt custard, adding moisture to the cake and taking the edge of the sugariness of the chocolate while filling out its full flavor. And I discovered a new fruit, the sapotí, which once ripened to squishiness delivers up sections of persimmon-ish texture and maple-syrup flavor.



People

While no doubt my tastebuds had a blast, I also owe my joy to two wonderful companions I met:

Romenko


I'd gotten used to ignoring the smiles and invitations of the hippie vendors in Brazil, only because their displays of friendliness generally lasted as long as they thought you might buy something. I don't know why I particularly sat down with Romenko after he waved me over, I suppose I had nowhere in particular to be. We got to chatting without talking about his wares; turns out he'd just arrived too, having spent the last couple of months making his way down the Amazon from Bolivia. Since he didn't really push on trying to sell me something (taking more pleasure in explaining his trinkets rather than trying to get me to buy them), I invited him to lunch. Turns out his dad's Croatian and he spent the better part of the eighties in what was Yugoslavia, with a brief mention of being involved in the conflict there of which I decided not to inquire further. His mom's Chilean, and he grew up in Santiago--as it is, he spoke in Spanish, which I was surprised to discover I can understand more or less without problems. He's been traveling for 10 years now, making it back to Santiago only twice during that time and spending the majority of it in Ecuador and Bolivia. His possessions are a few clothes, a hammock, his chessboard/display case, a guitar, and a Bolivian flute. He lives hand-to-mouth and has nowhere he needs to be. His creased eyes twinkle; I could not guess his age since his spirit seems so young.

We always seemed to meet up unexpectedly, but just at the perfect time to hang out. I was happy to bankroll our cheap rounds of cachaça together, and through him I would end up meeting another good-hearted hippie, Micha from Ecuador. I even gave him some work, asking him to make a necklace out of a shell I collected in Boipeba. He reminded me a lot of Mischa back in the US, and I felt incredibly at ease around him.

His word of choice to describe the good things of life: "halucinante!"

Saphyra


She danced her way into my life, or rather I should say I danced my way into hers. Initially I met her at a street party on the second night in town; she was one of the only people dancing to the funky guitar music in a crowd of people mostly looking-on over their beers. I decided dance like nobody's watching and rock out with her, and at the end of the night we walked hand in hand back to her flat.

A native loudovicence, as those of São Luís inexplicably call themselves, she is something of a local celebrity, having been a photographed and filmed numerous times as a representative traditional dancer, as well as being just all-around vibrant and friendly, mixed with a dose of attitude. Walking with her through the Reviver meant stopping every 100 feet to say hello and be introduced to someone or another, and I would later find people in other communities acquainted with her. She got pinned with the nickname "entidade," a reference to the magic in her presence and, no doubt, in her career as a dancer of the tambor de crioula, a traditional folk dance inherited from the quilombos of slaves in Maranhão (more below). Her bent is decidedly artistic, and she is a fashion-maker in her own right, pulling together unique outfits (sometimes of her own sewing) that she says occasionally produce copycats in following weeks.

At 26, she has two children, both of whom live with their fathers. She has been almost married at least once, a story she recounted to me in installments involving a possessive Austrian, her decision to break with him, and her rise to popularity among certain circles in Vienna. Apparently she'd been living in her mother's house until relatively recently, having secured (wiith a friend) a flat in a dilapidated building on the outskirts of the center. Her father is apparently a colonel in the military police and draws a jaw-dropping salary, but she has none of it; her hippie-esque, moneyless lifestyle is apparently in contrast to the more bourgeois tastes of her siblings. (I never met any of her family members.)

I would enter her world, if only just for a bit. And she would show me something of a whirlwind..."Deus me livre!" as she would say.

Bumba Meu Boi

Take the sparkly costume elements of Carnaval, mix them with an indigenous aesthetic, throw in a bit of Halloween, add a touch of Chinese New Year's--though instead of a dragon, you've got a bull--and give it the soundtrack of click-clacking matracas. You might just get an idea of this festival, found only in Maranhão and parts of Pará, the first of the June holidays here (replacing what would otherwise be the Festa de São João). Though the height of the celebration had long passed by the time arrived in São Luís, the different neighborhood Boi groups continued to give public shows four nights a week up until the end of July.

The festival comes from a fable deep in Maranhão's colonial past about a slave and his pregnant wife's craving to eat the tongue of the master's finest bull. In the story, the slave kills his master's bull for the tongue, and when the master finds out, the slave sets to running, sought by indigenous peoples and master alike. Just when things are looking bad, the bull miraculously revives, and the master throws a big party to celebrate. (A Joseph Campbell-esque analysis would be appropriate, I can only imagine that this story reflects something about harvest cycles.) Each Boi troupe decides to emphasize different elements of the story and uses different percussion rhythms, but the result is pretty much uniform to the undiscerning spectator: lots of dancing around of scantily clad "indíos" and twirling bulls backed up by a variety of outrageous masked characters, guys with giant ornate hats (weighing up to 17kg!), and a horde of hand drummers and/or matraca players--the latter being two blocks of dense wood click-clacked together in a metronomic style.







Thanks to Saphyra, I didn't just watch. Fueled by a bit of cachaça our second night together, she pushed through the enormous crowds to the side of the stage and hopped up. With only a split second's hesitation, I jumped up too to find myself on stage with all the dancers of the Boi de Santa Fé twirling in front and about me. Saphyra seemed to be perfectly comfortable breaking down the fourth wall on what was decidedly a spectator-oriented event, and I did my best to not look too far out of place, trying to macth the steps of the dancers. A bit of stage blur later, we were dancing off out the theatre with the rest of the troupe, laughing and snapping photos despite the glares from event security. Quite a rush, which was celebrated with yet more cachaça.

Besides getting my hand in on the matracas on a subsequent night, I had the fortune to go see the "death" of the Boi de Santa Fé--that is, the final closing parade for that neighborhood's group. One night, a few kids and Saphyra and I caught a taxi out to Bairro Fátima, one of the poorer and blacker neighborhoods, just in time to cross paths with the procession. It was the same thing as what I'd seen on stage, only snaking through the streets with all the residents looking on and occasionally joining in. We danced, we drank, we took too many photos. After a brief break in a reggae club, we ended up at the Boi's headquarters, where an enormous psychedelic tree-like spectacle was raised (the meaning lost on me completely). Shouts went up, and after a little bit it was all over, the giant hats hung up for another year and only the echoes of matracas left beating in my eardrums.





Curious and fun.

Culturally Independent

I also got to see a few tambor de crioula circles, owing in no small part to Saphyra's participation. It bears a superficial resemblance to Bahian samba de roda, in that the women wear large colonial skirts and dance while the men play the instruments and sing. However, the instrumentation is solely of tambors, large long drums created from hollowing out tree trunks; two smaller tambors lay down an unvarying rhythm while a large 5-6ft tambor throws down improvised beats to which the dancers respond. The only other sound is the clacking of a fourth drummer with two sticks hammering away on the back end of the larger tambor. The result is a particularly insistent, galloping rhythm with deep reverberating bass hits. For their part, the women do a lot of twirling, and it appears that the footwork matches the bass hits of the larger tambor (though too intricate for me to understand). The most curious part is that the women trade in and out of the circle by bumping bellies, a small detail surely but something I don't recall having ever seen before.



And it's not really for tourists. Sure, tourists come to watch, beckoned by the sound of the tambor in the street. But the dancers and musicians just do it for the sake of doing it, not for an audience--random circles break out from time to time in public spaces. On my last day in town, Saphyra and I went to the 87th birthday of one of the masters of tambor and also head of a Boi troupe, Apollônio Melônio--where I got to watch some equally elderly women bump bellies. The tradition seems to exist in a way that does not include commercialization, a surprising phenomenon given the transformation of anything "cultural" in Brazil into an industry of some sort. Perhaps it has partly to do with its connection and use in candomblé (syncretic afro-christian polytheism)-styled ceremonies, though I did not learn much about this.

More to the point, there are a litany of other festivals, dances, foods, and traditions that, like Bumba Meu Boi and tambor de crioula, only exist in Maranhão (and parts of Pará, which used to be part of the same region in the old days). I look forward to coming back again to catch the Festa Divina and cacuriá, which has been described to me as an incredibly sexually suggestive traditional dance. Maybe even try to get used to tiquira, an alcohol made from manioc that burns like a cheap whisky.



You drank a lot, huh?

Partly because I had good company, all of whom were drinkers. But more to the point, we came to start (and sometimes end) each evening out at Bar de Batista, a hole-in-the-wall cachaçeria that calls itself a "farmácia." The walls are lined with bottles of infused cachaças of every flavor imaginable, from fruits to herbs to spices to meats and mixtures therein. After several rounds of tongue-shocking experiments, I came to settle on ginger & honey--which would soon be the only thing that anyone drank, period. And to salt the tongue, peanuts left aside in favor of dried shrimp (but only if you ask for it, shrimp ain't cheap, y'know?). At 25 centavos a shot (US$0.10), the hippies and Saphyra and I and whatever other rabble we managed would set up on crates outside the bar, laughing and talking and playing guitars for cupful after cupful. And thus were the exploits described above fueled.





A good galera we were. And so it is that I am sad to have had to move on from São Luís; surely if I had known about it, I would have decided to spend much less time in Salvador and much more there. (No doubt, it is probably how Salvador might have been 10 years ago.) It remains still fairly below the international tourist radar, though it's gaining a reputation fast and is next in line of the domino tourism colonization of the Brazilian northeast. I hope that I can return to it and recpature some of that magic in the future, before it has been inevitably ruined.

And no doubt I owe so much of the magic to that entidade, Saphyra, a firey spirit who I will surely remember forever.

Rapid transit

I've written about the last couple weeks but haven't the chance to connect my compy somewhere. Anyway, just about to leave Belém and head to the interior of Pará state, in Marabás. Suffice it to say that guidebooks don't cover this area.

Best reason not to write

São Luís is keeping me grinning fabulously. More to come when life stops being so fun and unexpected.

Bye-Bye Bahia

I'm now killing a couple hours before a series of long, likely very uncomfortable buses takes me into the equatorial North. I have spent the last several weeks at Pátria Livre, and in this time I came to know the people better and really feel a part of the community towards the end. The sentiment was mutual, at least with the kids, who constantly asked when I would return and why did I have to go. Heartwarming. I left grinning.

I took a lot of notes and photos, and if I don't get to writing a big long article about it, I'm thinking maybe I'll try to do an exhibition/fundraiser back in the US--a distinct possibility given that friend Diana has shot a documentary about the place as well.

Anyway, as I said, to the North. First stop is São Luis in Maranhão state, followed by a national park of giant sand dunes, and then to Belém in Pará state to meet up once more with the MST and visit Amazonian settlements. Vague notions of jungle adventure, planning on making it up the great river and down a tributary to see the heart of the rainforest. Dispatches will hopefully come in between.

Onward!

Web skillz on display

Behold, I have finally gotten it online: the offical website of the Fundação Mestre Bimba. Created from the aether, extracted painfully slowly over a series of months from Mestre Nenel--the head of FUMEB (as it is acronymed)--translated by my few month's training in Portuguese, with business elements for domain creation handled by yours truly. I should add that it is still a work in progress, just now in presentable form. Do let me know what you out there think.

Now comes the hard part: creating documentation (in Portuguese) to guide Nenel into being able to edit the site on his own. This can only bring massive headaches; as such, I signed on to help out with maintenance for the next two years.

Also, check out a roughmade template for selling the berimbaus of Pequeno Mestre. (Only "portugues" is working at this time; click around, as some things work and others don't.)

SALVADOR: The Face(s) to Remember

[I left Salvador several weeks ago, figured I should put in a last hurrah.]

Rereading my initial impressions of Salvador, I notice that it is a description devoid of life. Conspicuously absent from it is any mention of the solteripolitanos (as residents call themselves). Undoubtedly, it is much easier to describe buildings and geography than everyday life and people, but this would be doing an injustice to Salvador, a city whose content is often more important than form, a place where beauty is found in energy rather than mass. Alas, I cannot show pictures, so I will just have to snap these shots in words.

Who You'll Find

There are the dreadlocked and bearded hippies sitting on the curb with their slings of earrings and necklaces or hemp bracelets, defusing your cold shoulder with unthreatening smiles.

There are the diminished dark-skinned beggar children, barefoot and in torn shirts, tugging at the shirtwaist or arms of tourists that try to ignore them, begging from "Meu amigo" with faces with the exact same dismal pleading expression every day you see them. (They learn to recognize you after some time and leave you alone.)

There are the haggard, shrivelled women walking down the street in a daze, sometimes rifling through the garbage or laid out on cardboard beds on the sidewalk.

There are the flocks of school-uniformed teenagers (that is, all wearing jeans and identical t-shirts with the school's name on it), books in hand (backpacks being an eccentricity) as they come and go all hours of the day to and from their high schools, a constant presence at almost every bus stop.

There are the chaveiros (keymakers) who sit in small blue kiosks scattered across the sidewalks, a curious thing when you wonder why only this niche profession has deserved such widespread kiosk implementation. (Besides fruit and newsstands, of course.)

There are the vendors who drive in their soundtrucks down the main avenues, announcing the prices for fruit or gas tanks. They like to go early hours.

There are the acarajé women, always under an umbrella in their white headwraps and laced traditional dresses, unoccupied with rarely a buyer in sight. (Yet they must get enough business somewhere along the way.) They are most often accompanied by a popcorn seller, always men. (A division of labor?) There are any number of snacks similarly sold on the street, from corn and hot dogs to processed sweets and baked goods. At night, small grills set up on street corners send up plumes of smoke from small churrascos (meat barbecues), and styrofoam coolers of beer and soda are never more than three armslengths away.

On the beach, you will inevitably end up turning away men with cheese on a stick and hot coals over which to grill it, men with picolé (popsicles), boys carrying giant sacks of mesmerizing-looking, over-priced roasted cashews on their shoulders, old men singing a song to advertise their cooked shrimp on a stick, and a stunning number of people trying to sell you a hammock.

There are the inevitable older, physically unattractive white men with young, black women on their arms or sitting down to drinks. There are the young, white women huddled around their charismatic Salvadoran man, or alternately carrying on their arms a silent, muscular man-boy. Down on the beaches and beachfronts of Barra, a sex industry subtly advertises around the clock, sunning itself on the sand during the day and sitting alone at bar tables at night. There are the transvestites and other prostitutes that stand alone in the abandoned late-night streets of the commercial districts, looking expectant and apprehensive. These are the ones who have not taken out adverts in the local paper or pasted posters inside phone booths describing what sexual acts they will perform (18+ prostitution being legal).

There are the skinny Salvadoran men, often shirtless, hanging out in the doorway or outdoor plastic tables of hole-in-the-wall bars, grinning and laughing and catcalling out "Gostoza!" to passing women, particularly the awkward white tourist women.

There is the army of janitors and streetcleaners in their bright colorful jumpsuits, working all hours of the day and night to stem a flood of riotous vegetation and rampant litter. There are the stout and khaki-uniformed military police, bulletproof vests worn at all times as they hang out on street corners waiting for something to happen. There are the incredibly bored transitworkers glued to their hard-plastic seats, endlessly annoyed at having to make change for bills tens of times greater than the fares.

There are the chic clubgoer young men and women, rarely seen outside of their cars except in expensive restaurants and shopping malls/clubs. They are generally on their cellphones with the frequency of a day-trader.

There are the retail workers dressed in some sort of seasonal get-up, depending on the forthcoming holiday; the larger retail stores seemingly have a half dozen attendants waiting for every shopper, except during the later afternoon rush in which elbowing one's way through crowds is perfectly acceptable.

There are the old men sitting in groups of four, slamming down dominos on outdoor "tables" that are large placards supported by their knees.

There are the kids who juggle coconuts at red stoplights, hoping for some coins from drivers.

There are the taxi drivers, sitting in groups late at night smoking and chatting, even though many of them will not get a fare depending on how long the line of taxis in front of them is. Some work six-hour shifts with other jobs on the side, while others work up to 20-hour shifts if business is good and they don't get too sleepy.

There are the parked cars on any given street with a booming stereo system, a crew of people taking drinks and making a party anywhere they feel like having one.

I could go on, but to what end? The people most important are the ones with whom I came to be friends.

Pedro


My housemate Pedro and I ended up decent friends, going out together most of the time toward the end of my stay. Incidentally, it took a breakup with his Argentine girlfriend, Lola (whom I also got along with really well), to push us to be friends, after going out and shooting the shit for a few hours, commiserating about women.

Relaxed but engaging, he's always got either a smile on his face or one waiting just around the corner of a deadpan remark. He's 23 and a film student, and in his spare time (as well as for work) he does 3D computer modeling and animation. He comes from an upper-middle class family, which is how he came to own his own apartment in the wealthy part of town. His armchair politics are left-radical, largely formed around his admiration for the Cuban state and realistic, if cynical view of democracy in Brazil--no end of conversation on these fronts. He has been for some time thinking of an impending move to Rio de Janeiro, as he feels he doesn't have the economic opportunities in Salvador that he seeks. He literally never cooks anything, not even making coffee, and he is fond of my cookies and Coca-Cola, despite it being the black water of imperialism.

His apartment was the meeting place and hangout for his circle of friends, owing to the lack of parental presence (it is quite common for well-off kids to live with their parents well into their 20s). I enjoyed constantly having people in the house, even if it did mean there was weed-smoke permeating into everything. (His friends Bruno and Ajudicabba I enjoyed most, themselves students in chemical engineering and law, respectively. Though in the beginning I was addressed by them only out of politeness, by the end of my stay I would find myself considered equal in company.)


They were dueling guitarists, too.

Pedro's philosophical statement of choice was "só alegoria" ("only allegory"), a sarcastic(?) twist on the Bahian expression, "só alegria" ("only happiness"). I'm not sure if I quite understand it still, but it is something to mull over.



He got into calling me "grande Jason," to which I would call him "Pedrão." I'll miss him.

Kerstin


Kerstin was the other mainstay in my social life in Salvador. I originally met her through my language school, who connected me to her since she was volunteering at the NGO Bagunçaço. An Austrian twentysomething, she had gotten a state-supported work sabbatical from her job with an airline and was spending a full year in Salvador, volunteering with kids and just enjoying life.

At first, we continued to meet up incidentally, through events sponsored by the language school. After some time we began counting on each other at least twice a week for company out to whatever bar or club. She was always ready to stay out the whole night, and I enjoyed having her energy around when it came to exploring other places--plus I always had a dance partner in a snap. A constant amusement was her blistering debriefs after each fellow who made an unsuccessful or disappointing pass at her.

Even though our main connection was relatively surface level leisure-orientation, we both respected each other for looking to other things during our time there. She doesn't want to go back to work for the airline, and given her maternal instincts with the kids at Bagunçaço, I wondered aloud why she didn't look into social work or education. I would not be surprised to find her a year later managing to get back to Brazil for further living--she is more and more at home here.

Other Characters

Chloe & Tosin

About the nicest pair of kids I've ever met, definitely shaking the British reserve with panache. I really wish I had more time to come to know them, as they were consistently delightful to be around. Good energy, them.

Chapinha, Anum, Lang, Jen

The capoeira crew. Canadians Lang and Jen were there the entire time I was, and Anum was our teacher, with Chapinha his girlfriend and our fellow student (though quite a bit more skilled).

Pequeno & Perola

Pequeno was the most friendly person I met at the Fundacao Mestre Bimba, chatting with me even when I was feeling antisocial, and he and his girlfriend Perola were there everyday to greet me. Nice kids.

A City with a Soul

Salvador's main industry appears to be "culture"--at times it seems like every third person is an artist, musician, performer, or somehow related to the cultural production here. Giving marginal children an arts education of some sort is the NGO industry; more than half the social projects I heard about or visited here were oriented in this way, and it seems that someone somewhere is trying to start another one any given day. I can only guess that such an orientation is partly due to a lack of any substantive industry in Salvador, and if you're going to be struggling to survive anyway, well heck, might as well be an artist.

While certainly a good part of the culture industry is geared toward tourists, be it dance schools or capoeira groups or musical performances or craftwork, there is no denying that every neighborhood on any given night features something worthwhile to see, listen to, or dance to. In this respect, there is an almost New York sense of vibrancy, of feeling like staying in for the night is missing amazing events, official and ad-hoc, all over town. There are no off-nights per se (though each place has its schedule), as many of the people of Salvador enjoy staying out all night regardless of what day of the week it is.

Moreover, great things are always coming to town. Teatro Castro Alves is just the flagship of a network of performance spaces constantly putting up irresistible shows from artists both near and very very far. The Cine Arte theatres constantly feature intriguing films from all over the world, and the Biblioteca Central can be counted on to be sponsoring one or another art/film festival on any given week.

Nightlife is institutionalized, too: the municipal government throws a party in the Pelourinho every Tuesday night, with free concerts and the attendant rows and rows of mixed-drink makers, acarajé stands, and churrascos. It's not just for tourists, as it seems people from all over town come to hang out and dance and cruise for someone to make out with (though I am told that the high incidence of tourists is the reason many solteripolitano men and women come here, looking as they are for foreign lovers). With drummers in the street and forró, pagode, and afrolatin on the stages, there are constant streams of people pushing through the narrow passageways through the crowds and packing one space to the next where music sets the body moving. It's the kind of place where you can go by yourself and still have fun (as long as you don't get robbed, a not uncommon occurence).

And on the weekends it seems half the city goes to relax on the beaches (except during winter, when 28 degrees centigrade is too cold for many), spreading tables and chairs without end down the coast, eating, drinking, playing futebol or squash, eyeing each other and finding excuses to introduce themselves. Thus is it that weekends end up being an alternation of low-level partying on the sand and high-level partying on the dancefloor.

Friendliness

Are people here more friendly, as the stereotype would have it? I can't definitively say. The racial divide is real, and as an obvious wealthy white person in a tourist-heavy town, I spent a lot of time dealing with friendly people who only wanted money from me. Moreover, without language fluency or even proficiency for much of the time, striking up conversation was too much of a labor and wearing on the patience of others.

But certainly people are not unfriendly; I never once received a cold shoulder, and you can say "Bom dia" to anyone on the street and expect eye-contact and a "Bom dia" in reply. And it is bewildering just how often you see people running into friends on the street or in clubs in a city of Salvador's size--though this could be the effect of "running with the same crowd," as after a few months I began to run into a number of known faces in different parts of town.

Perhaps it is less friendliness that humanness, an unwillingness to anonymize the world. For example, when you leave from a room of people, it is common to say goodbye to everyone individually, giving a kiss-kiss to the cheeks (Salvador, like Rio, is two-kiss territory, as opposed to São Paulo one-kiss) even of nominal acquaintances. As I mentioned before, when you say "Bom dia!" or "E aí?" to someone, even a stranger, you will get eye contact and a reply without fail. These instances do not mean people are more friendly--just that they're not willing to be systemically disengaged from the world around them. Brazilians seem to understand this difference, as Americans/Europeans who avoid eye contact and don't return "Bom dias" or kiss on the cheek are called fechado ("closed") rather than antipático ("unfriendly").

Last thoughts

Salvador was starting to get comfortable, but it wasn't so difficult to leave, as I was only just beginning to settle into a normal life there. Nevertheless, I did come away understanding why so many foreigners stay, or continue to come back time and again (I know that I will at some point). All told, a fun and creative place, up there with Kyoto, Oaxaca, and Paris in terms of cities outside the US that I would be happy to reinhabit. Other than that, there is nothing particularly profound I can think of.

(In the end, I didn't actually get out much beyond my normal neighborhoods, and most exucrsions were for nighttime festivities, not acquainting myself with the city. So I suppose that the Salvador I know is not very complete.)

I do know, however, that Salvador is still largely poor, and even though culture industry and attendant tourism is strong, it leaves a lot to be desired for most people there. The city grows, but it will not transform; things will remain largely the same for years to come, until either the tourist development becomes so overwhelming as to crush its soul (the Cancún fate), or until the inequality becomes so overwhelming as to repoduce São Paulo's tension. (The former is more likely.) I am optimistic that I can come back ten years from now and still know my way around.

CULINARIA: Battling Boredom with Remembrances of Fruits Past

It’s been a while since I wrote about new and odd culinary discoveries, but the truth is that lately there’s been nothing to write about. Food here in Vitória da Conquista does not aspire to anything above what is found on the assentamento: beans, rice, and overcooked meat. Fresh produce has exited from my life, as I have no kitchen with which to work, and salad here basically means cut-up green tomatoes—which is not actually a salad, since the concept of salad implies multiple ingredients. (Also, I would like to state for the record that potato chunks slathered in mayonnaise does not a potato salad make.) Barbeque is cool and all, but there’s literally no innovation beyond what humans began doing several thousand years ago. I mean, Christ, can’t you frickin’ *marinade* something once in a while?!

Also, something interesting (by which I mean upsetting) to note is that I have yet to encounter spicy food here. Yes, there are chilis available (the most common being a malagueta pepper, very small and often steeped in vinegar), but their use seems to be quite restrained. When I cooked a thai-styled curry for apartmentmates in Salvador, they could barely take two bites of what I consider moderate spiciness. I guess there’s no particular reason why there ought to be spicy food here, but I just assumed that somewhere along the way I’d encounter something with a little axé to it.

A Loose Interpretation of Pizza

The only alternative I’ve found to the norm is pizza, though a word about this: someone forgot to teach the Brazilians that tomato paste goes under the cheese. As a result, “pizza” would be more appropriately called cheesebread with toppings, making it feel even more unhealthy than it is. But people here can’t get enough of it, often taking it in rodízio (all-you-can-eat), frequently giving it a liberal dressing of ketchup, and occasionally enjoying it in dessert form—topped with bananas or other fruits.

Griping in the VdC

In fact, not just food, but rather all of Vitória da Conquista is strikingly plain. The Festa de São João, the Festa de São Pedro, and Bahian Independence Day were all complete washes here, no public events whatsoever (and I certainly didn’t feel like going to a commercial forró fest located inaccessibly outside of town). The only thing notable about the city is the sheer lack of interesting things to do or places to go, despite it being the largest population center in southwestern Bahia. My recent query on Orkut (the Friendster-type service that is inexplicably populated mostly by Brazilians) returned a number of responses all along the lines of, “There’s really not much to do here.” I only stay in town because I have a comfortable bed, a decent breakfast, and an internet connection. Otherwise, I am excited to get on the road again—though not until I’ve visited the only electronic music venue in town.

But I digress. To counter my gustatory torpor, I will turn to delights past that I should have written down already. Yes, I know I’ve already gushed about fruit here, but allow me to continue:

Pinha


Also known scientifically as atemoya or in English as sugar apple, the taste of this fruit is exquisitely custard-like—to be expected since it is in the same family as the custard apple and cherimoya. However, enjoying this fruit requires some tongue gymnastics, as it is an aggregate of sections around a central internal stem, and each section is a seed covered in a small layer of flesh. (It appears that the more misshapen the pinha (pronounced PI-nya), the more likely the seeds have not developed, allowing you to devour rather than pick your way through one.) When fully ripened, the fruit is fragile and literally falls apart with the slightest handling; as a result of this, I have often ended up eating pinhas originally intended for transport home.

A cross between the pinha and the related graviola is not uncommon, producing a fruit with a more continuous flesh and less seeds while still retaining the custard taste, albeit slightly acidic.

Mangostão


The white lobes of mangostão initially reminded me of a clove of garlic—an odd phenomenon to find inside an uninteresting and inedible husk. You must catch the fruit on the one or two days when it is perfectly ripe to be rewarded with its exquisite succulence, something resembling a bouquet of flowers with a subtle hint of citrus. Alas, the edible part is about the size of a shallot, making each fruit quite fleeting; after the first hit of mangostão it is difficult to resist cutting open the next one, and the next one. It doesn’t seem very common and is relatively expensive, so I’m recalling it from when Dave introduced it to me in São Paulo.

Unfortunately, there’s no chance of enjoying this fruit outside of where its grown—it apparently doesn’t ship well, and the tree is incredibly picky about soil and climate, not found outside of tropical environs.

Cajá

Imagine a strawberry crossed with an orange—but not as a mixture. Rather, imagine the “taste signature” of a strawberry, the way it hits your tongue: the incredible punch in the beginning, the slightly sour denouement, the “thickness” of the flavor in your mouth—and then replace that flavor with something more resembling an orange. If you can do this, congratulations, because it took me a bit of time to figure out how exactly to explain the at once familiar and foreign taste.

Cajá, apparently known in English as the hog plum, is ovoid, orange-yellow, and one to two inches long. It exists more in juice form than as a solid fruit, owing to the fact that it is mostly a large seed covered in a very thin layer of pulp. Thankfully, that means I get to enjoy as a refresher with any given meal.

Variations on a Theme

One of the other things that I forgot to mention is that even the fruits I know commonly are exciting: whereas we have basically one kind of banana in the US, there are at least five types here (not to mention the two types of plantains)! There are also at least four types of mangoes, three types of limes, two types of papaya, and several variations on the theme of orange/tangerine—my favorite amongst them being the pocam, a fist-sized, watery tangerine whose peel is wrinkled and practically falls off the fruit, making it incredibly easy for those without long fingernails to peel.

TRAVELOGUE: São João Beijos in the Middle of Nowhere

The delays of getting stuck in Boipeba's low-tide put me on a packed evening bus headed to Jequié, a nowhere midpoint on my way to Vitória da Conquista. I was not looking forward to transferring late night buses, and seeing all the towns along the way beginning first-night celebrations of the Festa de São João informed me that I would be missing a great party.

Festa de São João

The Festa de São João, also known as Festa Junina, is nominally about something having to do with John the Baptist (kind of like how Christmas has to do with the birth of Jesus). In reality, it's a country-themed, three-day party (falling this year 23 - 25), most strongly celebrated in the primarily-agrarian Northeast. Every place, from the largest cities to the smallest backwaters, sets up a main plaza with colorful flags strung overhead and features nights full of nothing but forró (pronounced fo-HO) music, relatively simple polka-esque country ballads that feature bass drum, triangle, and the accordion (sometimes including a guitar as well). Apparently, forró used not to be such a big deal, but has recently gained such mainstream popularity that it is a standard feature in major cities and even in Brazilian communities in the US. (My first contact with it was in a bar in New York.) The most famous of all forró songs, the unofficial anthem of the Northeast, is Luiz Gonzaga's "Asa Branca," a country classic:

"Asa Branca" Quando olhei a terra ardendo Qual fogueira de São João Eu perguntei a Deus do céu, ai Por que tamanha judiação Que braseiro, que fornalha Nem um pé de plantação Por falta d'água perdi meu gado Morreu de sede meu alazão Até mesmo o asa branca Bateu asas do sertão Então eu disse adeus Rosinha Guarda contigo meu coração Quando o verde dos teus olhos Se espalhar na plantação Eu te asseguro não chores não, viu Que eu voltarei, viu meu coração.

"White Wing" When I watched the burning land Like the bonfire of São João I asked to God above, oh Why such great ill-treatment What furnace, what oven Not a tree on the plantation For lack of water I lost my cattle Died of thirst, my old horse Even the white-winged bird Beats his wings upon the sertão* Then I say goodbye to you, Rosinha Guard my heart with you When the green of your eyes Spreads itself on the plantation I assure you, don't cry, That I will return to you, my love

The sertão is the arid, quasi-desert clime in the Northeast of Brazil, notable for its stunning droughts in an otherwise tropical environment.

While not everyone dresses up, it's not uncommon to see men sporting woven straw hats or cowboy paraphenalia and women decked out in colorful dresses of an old-time, rural aesthetic. There's also these funny leather hats with the brim pulled up in front, a stereotypical symbol of the tabareu (translates roughly as "hick" here) and the icon of the Festa de São João. However, the festival is going the way of Carnaval and becoming very commercial, with bloco shirts required for admission into popular concerts; it also seems that some of the big Carnaval names switch acts from axé to forró just for the holiday.

Of course there is the attendant drinking, the traditional intoxicant being a liquor made from infusing cachaça with genipapo fruit--a sticky, sweet cinnamon-esque shot that I don’t care much for. Also, fireworks and firecrackers are standard fare at all hours, and outside of houses and in public plazas people burn identically-constructed wooden pyres, a tradition whose import is clearly lost on me.

It is the biggest thing outside of Carnaval in Bahia, and for rural cities it is the biggest thing, period, as people travel to middle-of-nowhere places just to celebrate. Moreover, this year’s festival created 60,000 temporary jobs in the Northeast, according to a news report I watched. Everyone’s got a reason to be happy.

As Fate Would Have it...

And everyone on the bus is happy, sharing drinks and chatting animatedly, shouting on occasion. It seems just about everyone is traveling from the coast into the interior to pass the holidays with family members in rural communities. In every station we go through there are more travelers than capacity, but the bus operators have little problem with smashing as many people into the aisle as possible. Thankfully, I got on at the first stop with a bona fide ticket, so I watch the spectacle bemusedly from my comfortable window seat.

I get to chatting with my neighbors, three Baianas who are all cousins and making their way from Salvador. Even before they know my name, they are trading swigs of their homemade corn-infused cachaça with me and telling me about their family. I am thrilled to have spirited bus conversation, and in between their queries of where I’m from, whether I’m married, and the like, I learn that they are traveling to the town of Gandú to spend the weekend partying with at least a dozen other cousins, aunts/uncles, and nieces/nephews, some of which they’ve never met. I ask one of the women how many people are in her family, to which she responds, “at least 40.” (That’s immediate family plus all relatives of first-degree.) Clearly, it’s going to be quite a bash.

One of the women, Silvia, is quite a character. She is energetic and talking on and on, extrovert to the max in a way that would suggest she might be missing a gear somwhere along the way, constantly forgetting and asking me over and over if I understand Portuguese, calling me “Frank” for some reason, while at the same time unable to break out of a deep Spanish accent and vocabulary. She has just flown in from Spain, where she’s lived the last four years, and she’s clearly more worldly than the others, at one point unsure if I’ll think less of her since she doesn’t belive in religion (that being a rarity in Brazil). She is delighted to have someone to talk with about the delights of the Global North, and as we approach Gandú she invites me to come stay with their family. Sara, one of the other women, clearly smiles and gives me the eye.

This is how I find myself in the middle of nowhere, getting introduced to aunts, uncles, and cousins as the namorado (“boyfriend”) of Sara.

Night in Gandú

The house of the host aunt and uncles is teeming with cousins. Many of these people, though family, have never met, and yet they are received with a striking intimacy. Though clearly a foreigner and not a relation, I too am given a warm welcome and treated like one of the gang. After an hour or two of introductions, bubbling conversation, trading photographs, and changing into evening clothes, a group of six of us head out to the main plaza to get dinner and take in the scene.

Gandú is about 40,000 people and sits on a major highway on the western side of the coastal forest biome, in the middle of cacau country. The town’s center has a charming artificial lake surrounded by trees, grass, and benches, strung all the way around with lights. On the lower end is the main plaza, which this night has a giant 30-foot post in the middle strung with flags to all edges and corners, creating a colorful “roof” of sorts in front of the stage. By the time we make our way past, the festivities are already in full swing, and we sit down at a churrasco on the back edge of the plaza for some beers and pratos feitos. I do what I can to keep up with conversation, but it is difficult with the noise and the machine-gun velocity of the dialogue--I am happy just to be there. Others from the family show up as we are finishing, and Silvia takes advantage of the wait by going out toward the bus station and smoking a joint behind some parked cars. It is amusing to watch her brush off the flirtations and embraces of one of the fellows, reminding him each time, “We’re cousins!”

All ten or so of us soon make our way into the crowd of packed bodies and attempt to dance. My forró is considerably out-of-sync and stilted, but Sara does not seem to mind, is more intent on just making out. Indeed, given my aloofness, inability to be talk so well, and general deference about what to do, I get the sense that I have become her arm candy for the night. She’s not really my type, but all that matters is that we’re having fun.

We all manage to remain as one group, despite the crowds and the amount of running hither and thither for drinks or bathroom (i.e. finding an unoccupied dark corner or car behind which to pee). Around 2am, we all head off to the bus station to wait for an incoming uncle, who ends up arriving an hour and a half late. By this point I am postiviely exhausted, between the day full of travel, being awake nearly twenty-one hours, the drinking, and the concentration for hours on rapidly-paced Portuguese. The others seem content to call it a night as well, given that there’s a weekend of hanging out ahead.



I can’t sleep, my bed being a non-functioning pad on top of cement. I’m up at 9am with the host family, and though I have further invitations to stay, I want to get to Vitória da Conquista in time to celebrate with the MST assentamento. Fun enough, we all exchange phone numbers, and then I grab an 11am bus to continue on my way to Jequié.

Those Brazilian women...

Postscript

After yet another full day on buses and lack of sleep and hangover and not good eating, I end up being too tired and sick to make it out to Pátria Livre when I arrive in Vitória da Conquista.

Well, at least there's the Festa de São Pedro this weekend!

TRAVELOGUE: High Spirits at Low Tide in Boipeba

My first destination after leaving Salvador was the Ilha de Boipeba, an island about which I had heard good whispers and which the Lonely Planet seemed to emphasize as being less sought than it should be. Last time I had a chance to explore the Bahian coast, I found disappointment in the overdevelopment of Itacaré; this time, I vowed to go about things differently. I had a premonition that I had chosen correctly when I found that I was the only tourist on the boat, conspicuous with my large backpack in a crowd mostly carrying hand luggage and groceries.



Boipeba sits on the point where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Rio Inferno, which isn't really a river but rather an estuary flowing through a labyrinth of mangroves and sandbars. The damning name apparently comes from wayward Portuguese explorers centuries ago who learned that the current changes direction and the water level rises and falls with the tides, varying up to 2 meters (and thus stranding deep bottomed ships). What at first seemed to be a weird species of mangrove was pointed out to me by my neighbor as merely the leafy tops of the trees sticking out of a high tide.

That neighbor turned out to be Catita, a relaxed and amiable Brazilian woman of 32 who had just moved to Boipeba in December to escape the aforementioned rapid overdevelopment in Itacaré. She lives with her husband Paulo, 37, and they are expecting their first child in a few months. Both work as jewlery makers--the kind of stuff that I am used to seeing carted around by all the hippies, except they handmake all their own stuff and clearly have more creativity. I learned all this because after pleasant boat conversation Catita invited me to stay in an extra room in their house for 15 reais a night, thus saving me some cash compared to pousadas there and giving me some company and orientation. Their house is down several dirt and sand paths back in the residential area, a small four-room place filled with warmth, a lot of hip-hop/reggae, and a shaggy dogbeast named PeterTosh.



Catita estimates that about 2000 people live in Boipeba, and my impression is that it is less--or else that number reflects the number on the island in total, not just in town. The tourism industry is visible (lots of pousadas, one or two tchochke shops) but pleasantly kept below ugly levels and relegated more or less to the beachside parts of town. I am one of literally no more than a dozen tourists in town during my stay, and certainly the only foreigner--apparently the industry is more or less dormant outside of summer. The people are friendly, returning my "bom dias" with alacrity, and they by and large seem quite happy, many singing as they walk here and there. A lot are fishermen. Life seems simple.



I spent my night wandering pretty much every street in town. Up a hill from the docks is the main square with the obligatory futeból field, surrounded by small grocers and residences, with a quaint little church at the end of a road up a farther hill. Past the central square the derelict cobblestone paths turn into sand and fork north and south, both routes crossing a rivulet of the estuary and continuing back further into the island where most people live. Beyond that it turns into farms, most of which seem to be palm plantations. Walking north from the docks along the coast, the pavement turns to sand and the tourist pousadas set out their tables and chairs, though after rounding the corner where the ocean meets the river, one need only walk another 100 meters to feel all alone on a desert island. I went out to this point and stared transfixed at a fullmoon-lit, peopleless beachscape for an hour, just soaking in the beautiful tranquility.



It rains at night, and clouds threaten in the morning. Nevertheless, I set out with my daypack along the beach, and within minutes the sun rewards my will. Turning south at the point where the ocean meets the river, I pass fishermen with lines in hand, filling their buckets with carapeba quite rapidly. It is low tide, and I walk down at the water's edge admiring all the surfaced sandbanks and tidepools, wading far out at one point to an island of sand amongs the waves. My going is slow, as I alternately stop to gaze at the view, collect shells, and admire the nuances of nature in the sand and the foliage.


Nature's art.

My remixing of nature's art.

As shell collecting continues, I come upon a random yellow fruit. Sense of adventure tingling, I break it open and take a taste. It has a pasty/mealy texture and tastes like a vaguely citrus-flavored, weak sweetener. The seeds inside are in an axial cluster, and are actually very astringent nuts (having collected some, I plan to roast them when I get the chance and see what happens). I later come upon the tree that bears the fruit, and having snapped photos take one fruit with me, which later Paulo identifies as canfu. I also come upon some small mango-looking fruits that have a magenta flesh that smells and tastes like a bouquet of roses! Unfortunately, there is little flesh to eat.


The canfu fruit and nuts...

Eschewing the trail, I stumble my way across the loose rocks of the point, rounding it to finally come to the almost deserted Cueira beach, a crescent of sand with palms lined up practically on the water. As the sun gets covered by ominous dark clouds, I decide to brave the storm and head southward, having hear that a small village Moreré lays about 2 hours slow walking from the town of Boipeba. I eventually come to an inlet separating me from the path to Moreré and decide to attempt a crossing with my daypack held above my head. The tide is rising, and the water comes up to my shoulders at the deepest point. About two-thirds across, I suddenly step onto very sharp rocks or coral or something, and the strong current ensures that I stumble several more gashing steps before gaining something resembling sure footing and gingerly pick my way back to the bank I cam from. I emerge from the water with red trails oozing across my heels, toes, soles, outstep. Woohoo for adventure!



As I stand admiring my red badges of courage, I watch a pretty woman come from the other bank and make a crossing at an entirely different juncture--clearly aware of the sharp rocks I had recently discovered. She turns out to be a paulistana journalist who has lived all over Brazil, and the pleasant conversation as we walk back to Boipeba helps take my mind of the stinging cuts. It's nice to have the pretty company, too, and nicer still when we lose the trail due to high tide and have to pick our way through backroads and across farms back to town. (Though this detour took us into a dendê plantation--an amazing looking nut!)


I didn't know that fluorescent orange could be found naturally. They look like fire!

I spend the evening hanging out in the kitchen with Paulo, Catita, and their friend Dimas, who I later pay to henna tattoo a map of the world across my arm. Dinner is amazing even though it is simply rice, beans, chicken and veggies, partly because I barely ate anything all day and partly because salty food tastes really good when you're dehydrated. I show my gratitude by doing the dishes. Later, Paulo takes me aside to show me a collection of neat things (tortoise shells!) and his work, and what at first seems like show-and-tell turns into a sales pitch, which I try to defuse with questions about his technique, how he got involved, where he gets his material. Unfortunately it is to no avail, and I have to wriggle my way out unable to use a solid "no," which feels uncomfortable while I am guest in his house since it would feel personal.

Thankfully, the next morning I clear the slightly fouled air a bit by demonstrating how to make cookies. Catita is visibly excited to learn, and the first taste shows up as a giant grin on her face (to my relief, since I've been ad-hocking the recipe every time and the butter was slightly turned). I experiment with cinnamon, chocolate powder, and peanut butter, all of which work. Paulo is especially interested how to make the cookies with marijuana, clearly thinking through their worth in sales to tourists during high-season. I'm glad at least I could give back.

And this is when I realize: I can travel by baking! What separates tourism and traveling is that the former is totally consumption-oriented, whereas the latter involves giving of oneself (be it in dialogue, in play, in art, or in gift). Given that I have not developed my circus skills at all and that I do not have any particular artistic talents, cooking is just the thing to share with the world. Engaging the world by tongue and stomach, not too shabby.

I catch the once-daily boat back to the mainland in good spirits, happy to have satisfied my curiosity in Boipeba and found such delightful place. That is, until the boat runs aground on a low-tide, and we sit idel for two hours in the rain. Rio Inferno indeed.


Something about boats at low-tide is so beautiful...

Currently in the middle of nowhere

...at a bus terminal internet cafe (what a GREAT idea!). Lots of time in transit, passing time in places that guidebooks don't go, several adventures. Will relate all when Ì'm settled after these crazy days that are the Festa de São João.

Mailbag!

So is anyone out there wondering anything in particular? Anything at all--from the most general (daily life, social norms, etc) to the most specific (what brands I find in stores, what slang I hear, etc)--go ahead and ask me under comments, and I'll make an effort to answer questions.

I figure this might be fun, since I have some spare time before I head out of Salvador next week. And also I know that I haven't exactly conveyed what life is like here.

Something Resembling a Normal Social Life

It occurs to me that I've developed something resembling a normal social life, complete with friends and going out on a semi-regular basis. There have been a string of good days lately...

Wednesday

I woke up to sunlight pouring through my window--not the shadowless glare of yet another rainy day, but rather rays of light coming from blue sky. Sitting in my underwear, munching on a bowl of yogurt with chopped banana, mango, and granola, I spent the morning finishing my incredibly educational English-language book, Wall Street: How it Works and for Whom by David Henwood, and reviewing the vocabulary I learned from the previous night's excellent Portuguese class. And the maid Pedro has hired was there to clean the messy sink and take on some of my laundry for me.

I caught a bus to Pelourinho and, after a lunch of Chinese food (with tofu!), caught up on some good news emails from friends in the US. Also found that a client is happy with a Perl script I've loaded onto her site, which makes me happy considering I don't know Perl and taught myself how to implement the stuff in a couple hours. Afterward, I bought a sparkling new pair of capoeira trousers while playfully correcting the saleswoman's English and headed to class. I was feeling nicely balanced even though my reactions were off, and just generally feeling chipper made for good conversation with the kids in capoeira class. Afterward, I walked over to the MST state headquarters and had an easier-than-expected conversation with the director of international relations there, who agreed to help me with contact information for settlements in various places (as well as complimenting my Portuguese). I also picked up a textbook written by the MST about the history of land reform and the organization, which will further supplment me on the context of things.

Back home I got down to making a fresh pot of beans and cooking another batch of cinammon cookies, all while hanging out and chatting with Pedro and the other apartmentmate Martin. My dinner of rice and beans (with onions mixed in and cheese and tomatoes on top) was just perfect, the spices (cumin, coriander, chilies, bay leaf, black pepper, basil) right on and the vegetables well-picked.

Then off to Santo Antonio where I met up with some recently befriended Brits, Tosin and Chloe, to watch the football match between Brasil and Argentina. Even though it was a poor match for the Brazilians, losing 3-1 on some horrible first-half playing, I enjoyed hanging with the kids (the most friendly people I've met so far!) and throwing back a few beers on their tab. It was midnight by the time the game ended, so I hailed a cab (the driver unable to guess my nationality due to my decent Portuguese accent--compliment #2 of the day!) and set off to Beco de Gao, a samba and pagode club, where I met up with an Austrian I befriended through the language school, Kerstin. The energy of the club was great, the people stereotype-Bahian friendly, and I loved watching the truly gifted samba women showing off their thousand-mile-an-hour hips. It was amusing to huddle with Kerstin after each guy who made a pass at her, and I even danced with a few Brazilians (though without a single thought to attraction, they generally being much older), having fun just doing my own thing since the samba was too athletic for the cramped quarters.

A split cab later I fell into bed around 4am. Just felt like a good day.

Friday

Again I awake to sunlight streaming into my room. What are the chances? A quick breakfast later I'm in my swimsuit and catching a bus out to an almost empty Amaralina beach. I pass the middle of the day jogging and stretching on the sand, all part of a hope to begin reversing the slow downhill slide of my fitness. I also get lightly toasted to add some color to what is rather pale skin, considering my location. After washing away the sweat with a quick dip in the ocean, I walk back through the neighborhood of Rio Vermelho, first to get some good news from friends and family across the internet, then to sit down to lunch in a scrumptious por quilo restaurant of traditional Bahian food. (It's been a while since I gave myself to eating seafood and dende.)

I hurry back to the apartment to change clothes and grab my capoeira gear for Pelourhinho. At Fundacao Mestre Bimba I am lucky to catch a two-hour lesson with Pequeno Mestre, able to keep my balance and strength through it, though I am pouring sweat by the end. After cooling off with a suco de cacau com leite, I drop in on the free classes at the dance school that I only recently learned about. I spend the first two hours mixing it up in a forro class that, though more basic than my skills, gets me dancing with a couple of young, cute girls (and a couple of older, enthusiastic women too). I am happy to garner the attention, possibly due to the fact that I seem to be the only man in the class with the skills to do everything correctly and with feeling (though again I break a sweat, forgetting that ballroom can actually be quite athletic). Afterwad, I watch the remains of an Afro-Brasilian dance class--the most exuberant dancing I've ever seen, an energy and rawness of movement that gives the impression that the dancers are possessed by the rhythms of the drumming. I make plans to go next week.

Then, because I happen to be in the neighborhood, I head over to the capoeira angola roda that Lang, a Canadian who trains at FUMEB, plays in, since she said that the last time I went was a fluke of poor playing and low energy. Indeed, this time people are smiling a lot more and the play is more playful; there is also a contingent of Japanese participants, which I for some reason find amusing. I catch only the last half hour, and then the samba de roda begins and I'm pulled up off my feet and into the circle, throwing down crazy rapid steps to keep up with the beat (I do a reasonably good job, samba is beginning to feel more natural)--just after I'd finished drying the sweat from my dance class, too. The day has been a continuous cycle of getting sweaty and cooling off only to get sweaty again. But it doesn't bother me one bit, because it's the most joy of movement my body has had in a single day.

Being already past 10pm, I decide to grab dinner out. At the restaurant/bar, I run into some Germans I had met around town previously, Miles and Felipe. We end up splitting drinks for an hour before Ricardo(!) shows up--apparently having known the Germans through some film project. A wonderful surprise, though the conversation becomes Miles warning Ricardo not to take a film job because of the horrible person that is the producer-director. An amusing description of this fellow's lies, exploitation, bad temper, and frequenting of prostitutes is accompanied by more beers. We close down the place (to which it appears the Germans are regulars), and we all split a taxi back to Campo Grande.

This time I'm back home by 1:30am, not too shabby. But I have to wash my sweaty clothes right then and there when all I want to do is sleep.

Saturday

I force myself up at 9am to bake batches of chocolate chip cookies. After two hours and burning myself only once, I bag themup and take off for FUMEB again. Today is the 19th anniversary of the founding of the capoeira school, and after the regular saturday roda (in which I play like crap), everyone (~100 people in all) goes outside for samba de roda, maculele, showing off aerials, and lunch, all under a lucky third consecutive day of sun. I spend the time taking pictures of the spectacle and get pulled into the maculele (which I am out of practice in).

I have to run by 3pm to make a language class with my new professor, Augusto, who is excellent. I can really feel my vocabulary expanding under his tutelage, and being a philologist he has interesting factoids and insights into the Latinate roots that I never knew.

Back in the apartment, cooking rice and beans I get into another long political conversation with Pedro, followed by a longer political conversation with him and Paulo, the new apartmentmate--from Columbia University, no less. After hanging out on the couches for a couple hours, Pedro and I take off for Pelourinho. His girlfriend has just broken up with him, so he's in need of some good venting and a night out. We wander across a couple of bars talking a mix of politics and women, and then I get a call from Kerstin saying she and friends are heading to a club nearby. We got to meet them in what turns out to be a very NYC-styled rock & electronic music club, where Pedro can begin to get over things by making out with Kerstin while I rock out to some suprisingly good Brazilian rock, followed by some surprisingly bad Brazilian rock. Drum n' bass in the intervals between sets really gets me going. But after ogling the punk rocker Brasilian girls, I have to admit I am altogether too tired to be adventurous, and end up catching a ride back with Kerstin's friend to the apartment. Pedro, for his part, is frustrated at not have Kerstin come home with him, which is no end of laughter for me while he vents in a typically Brazilian machismo way.

And I pass out 4:30am.

Back in Salvador

After a brief jaunt up the Bahian coast, I've arrived back in Salvador, where I plan to stay for a couple of weeks to finish up the websites I've promised to make and maybe take a few supplementary Portuguese classes. Turns out my old room with Pedro was free, so I'm back where I was. It was nice to feel received back at the Fundacao Mestre Bimba (as though my absence had been felt a little), and through it I've met a couple of really warm Brits, whom I ended up splitting drinks with until the wee hours last night.

In news of the curious, I ended up going to a trance club two nights ago, just to see what it would be like. Funny to see women in high heels trying to keep going to the agressive tempo, hilarious to see people attempting to dance together (trance being a very individual endeavor). Lots of subcultures came out to play too, from goth/metal to normal/fratboy-esque to hippy/activist-types. Unfortunately, the DJs had no sense of pacing, and so the beats were too frenetic to keep up with past 4am.

In other news...

...my tentative date to arrive back in the US has been set at 8 August. Be warned.

MST: A Week in Patria Livre

The first thing I noticed after the bus pulled away was that there was no sound but the wind and the crunching of our shoes on the dirt track, which curled off from the highway through some trees and bushes out onto a sunbaked plain. The unsheltered kilometer walk under a midday sun would have seemed oppressive were I not filled with excitement to visit my first MST settlement.

Pátria Livre lies ensconced in coffee fields one kilometer down a dirt track that curls off from the highway. On any given day the bus driver is liable to forget that you requested a stop at the entrance to this track, given that you are the only person getting off here; indeed, every day you are the only person who asks to be let out on this otherwise fairly empty stretch between two medium-sized forgettable towns. When the bus pulls away, the only sounds remaining are your shoes crunching on the path and the wind across the plain. As you walk that kilometer under a midday sun through a once-farmed plain, you see no sign of settlement. You may begin to wonder if you are in the right place. You pass along the edge of a coffee field, and after a bit the track forks to the right. Peering around it, you will see the vermilion MST flag flapping against a blue sky. You walk to a break in the fence under the flag, and in front of you sits a series of shacks aligned along the sides of a plaza of cleared earth. The few kids playing stop to eye you with curiosity, and as you step onto the grounds you might wonder if there's some sort of place that visitors ought to go, a reception hall or registry or something. You meet the eyes of someone looking out from a house, and for a moment wonder if you are not intruding.

No. "Bom dia" is returned with an enthusiastic "bom dia," thumbs ups can even be exchanged. It turns out that you are welcome, because frankly, the only people that ever come here must be friends.



History

Pátria Livre is a young community. The land was first occupied a year ago, and due to the landholder's desire to receive government funds rather than fight for the land, it received recognition rapidly and is now going on its eighth month as an assentamento (as opposed to an accampamento, which is the term for unrecognized settlements). The transfer of land included with it a series of buildings on the property, which are now used for collective activities (meeting place, school), though a number are left uninhabited for reasons that escape me. Almost all of the 24 families currently residing in Pátria Livre live in shacks constructed from tree branch frames, tarpaulin walls, and corrugated PVC ceilings with earthen floors.

While there is electricity flowing to the community (and thus, a constant soundtrack of really bad Brazilian pop blaring from radios), there is no sanitation or water. People get their wash water from a source further down the dirt track, carried back in heavy, sloshing full buckets, and they apparently get their drinking water from a mix of a weekly delivery truck and treating collected wash water (mmm, tasty chlorine). Sanitation remains a mystery to me; I am guessing a cesspit has been dug under the two bathrooms currently in use, but honestly have no idea.

Besides buildings, the landholder also left his fields: hectares and hectares of neatly rowed coffee plants. Thus was the livelihood of Pátria Livre determined more by chance than by choice, though it is now complemented by gardens promising squash, corn, manioc, and beans that will become dinners rather than dollars. (I wonder about the wisdom of attaching one's fate to the coffee market, given its volatility and relative lack of appreciation for northern Brazilian varieties, but for a new settlement it is quite a boon to have fields already planted.) The community has decided to harvest the coffee on a collective basis (according to To Inherit the Earth, only about a quarter of settlements take on this approach), and it appears that there are more plants than hands to pick them.

In halting conversations, I learned that most people in Pátria Livre have only been a part of the MST for a year and a half or so; the max I get is five years, from the (seemingly) eldest member Dona Joãna. That means that this settlement is, for most people, their first (it is not uncommon for some families to relocate to new settlements, as encampments, once recognized, generally afford land for only a fraction of initially occupying families). Many are originally from the area of Vitória da Conquista, but a distinct number come from other parts of the state or other states. Almost all have family members living on the outskirts of São Paulo, to which so many have migrated and continue to migrate in search of economic opportunities.

While every once in a while there's some business to take care of in Vitória da Conquista, the people of Pátria Livre generally stay in the community. Besides the occasional family member or passerby of neighboring farms, their only contact outside the community are the teachers (both for kids and for adults) and the coordinators from the regional office, who come for weekly meetings about the direction of the community and to make consensus-based decisions about a variety of topics. They don't expect people to just stop by to say hi, much less stick around helping out. Especially people from other countries. So it is no surprise that in her two previous months there Diana had become quite a sensation; following on her heels (her last day there was my first), I too was received with a warmth and hospitality that made me blush.


Diana doing her documentary thing.

Host

I suppose it is an accident that Markos ended up being my host. He was on the national march as well, so we had at least laid eyes on each other previously, and he seemed young enough to treat me as a peer. (I would learn later that he is in fact 21, though I would have guessed five years above this.) Diana interviewed him on the day she was there, and so perhaps I came away with a sense of his being more important in the community than others; I only realized later that he was no more an authority than anyone else.



He lives in a shack that sits in the middle of what would otherwise be an open plaza in front of the entrance to the settlement. He lives with his wife Julia, and they have a daughter, Beatriz, of 1 year 8 months. I always left my daybag in his house, coming and going as I pleased, and a good chunk of my time was spent sitting on a chair or bench in front of his place, hanging out with him and others in what shade we could manage. Every day without fail Julia would offer me a scrumptious plate of rice and beans, and I managed to be surprised each time, consdering I would have thought my presence a strain on the pantry. (She also introduced me to shu-shu, a prickly, green, squash-looking vegetable that is steamed or boiled to make what tastes like buttered green beans.)

Cultural Exchange

The other fellow I ended up befriending was Romilson. We initially met as he helped me keep the kids from getting to rambunctious my first day there, and at first confused and amazed to meet me. He asked where I was from, to which I replied, "United States, near the city of San Francisco." His follow up: "Is that near Brasília?" I thought at first I just wasn't understanding him correctly, but it turns out indeed that I needed to explain that I was from a different country very far away.



He was amused by my broken Portuguese and kept telling me, "Sua lingüa é differente,” my tongue (meaning language) is different than his. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had to explain that in my country we spoke English, not Portuguese. Diana soon came over, and we exchanged a few sentences in English, which stunned him for a bit, after which he said he couldn’t understand what we said. His mind was blown, just a little. I politely pointed out that we were indeed speaking English. (I suppose that when Diana was around, he never heard her English since she had no fellow speakers with which to talk.)

A couple days later I brought an atlas with me to try to clear up what remaining confusion their might be. He asked me how long it was by bus from my hometown to here. I dutifully calculated that it would take several weeks of bus riding but explained that I came by airplane. Markos, who was sitting with us at the time, asked how much it cost. I said cheap flights were USD $650. He asked me to translate that into reais--roughly 1,700 I replied. Wide eyes.

Though much conversation was “what it’s like there vs. what it’s like here” on other topics--music, agriculture, politics, etc--people would commonly ask how much something costs in the US, and I would translate it into reais. At one point they asked me the minium wage of the US, to which I responded roughly 2100 reais per month, raising eyebrows all around. (In Brasil, the federal salário minimo is 270 reais per month.) There were not a few expressions of understanding why so many people go to the US to make money. I made sure to back up the conversation and explain the concept of purchasing power parity, and after some brief calculations based on food prices, determined that in PPP terms US minimum wage is equivalent to about 900-1000 reais per month, which is still quite significant.

Working

One of the days I went out to the coffee fields to help out and see what the operation was like. Unfortunately, I spent about an hour looking for which plot they were working that day, trudging through underbrush that had grown up in between the neat rows of coffee. By the time I found everyone way out on the northeastern edge of the plantation, my trousers and socks were inundated with pricklies and other hangers-on of startling variety and even more startling difficulty to remove.

Romilson showed me around, and after lunch we set to picking. The work is rather simple: stripping the branches to remove all coffee beans, which fall onto a tarpaulin placed below the bush. There is a certain mercilessness to it, as the stripping of the branches usually removes leaves as well as beans; a plant that starts as a yellow- and green-festooned verdant bush becomes a blighted-looking skeleton of a bush. It is a wonder that the plants survive this onslaught. I found myself struggling to keep up with Romilson's pace, a ceaseless rain of beans onto the tarp, largely because I wasn't so indiscriminate in my branch-stripping.



The beans are a variety that yellows when ripened, and the bean itself is apparently a lighter type (I forget the name). Squeezing the bean out of its husk, it is covered in a sweet film that quickly loses its flavor. Biting the bean open gives an astringent, yet vaguely pleasing coffee-esque flavor. Similarly, I notice that after some time my hands are faintly redolent of coffee. Funny, that.



We don't talk much during the afternoon; the work is quite meditative. (Thank goodness for clouds, or else the heat would have been horrible.) Three hours go by relatively quickly, and as a brief sunshower rolls across us we get to picking out the twigs and leaves from the collected beans. Together we have picked one and a half incredibly heavy sacks, which Romilson lugs over to a waiting donkey cart. The beans, after further sifted for detritus, will be laid out on a concrete patio to dry for several days before being sold.



The norm for a day's work (7:30am - 11am, 1pm - 4pm) seems to be two to three full sacks. Each sack makes three canisters, which are the packing unit that is sold in market. Each canister apparently gets sold to a distributor for 2 reais apiece, and they currently have a market price of 6 or 7 reais. This means that each individual's work makes around 15 reais a day. Times six days a week, taking out a little bit for holidays, meeting days, and heavy rain, my guess is that monthly earnings here are roughly 300 reais (USD $120) a month for each working adult. (Though couples often work together, sometimes in a turn-taking fashion, so actual earnings might be sightly lower.) The harvest period of coffee is not year-round (the number of 8 months sticks in my memory for some reason), so I'm guessing that yearly individual income tops out around USD $1000.



Because the market price is triple their sales, I inquire into transportation options. Apparently, there was a meeting the previous night about transit issues; the secretariat in Vitória da Conquista has a truck and wants to ship the beans to market directly, rather than have the members sell to a distributor. I'm not quite sure why this isn't a no-brainer--clearly I missed the nuances of the question--but it seems that this change is being implemented.



Meetings

I should note at this point that there were at least two general meetings and several coordinator's meetings during the little over a week I was visiting Pátria Livre. Unfortunately, I was either unable or not thinking to inquire into the structure of decision-making and authority, but my basic understanding is that everyone is in one way or another involved in running the assentamento, with responsibilities divided into committees (health, education, etc) and coordinators at the head of each. The people from the secretariat, which is responsible for all the settlements in southwestern Bahia, seems to be a mix of regional coordinators and directors that liase with state and national offices. (I am told that the hierarchy is quite solid.)

Decisions are made by consensus, and it seems that the norm is for meetings to go hours long, well into the evening with the kdis running around outside and occasionally in and out of the meeting hall. Again, due to my focus elsewhere during my short time, I did not get to observe or inquire into these meetings much.

Kids

What a handful, what fun. I spent most of my time at Pátria Livre playing with the children, with vague efforts focused toward teaching them. When I first came, accompanying Diana, we spent the afternoon helping a couple of the kids color in a giant map of the Americas that we drew, and I taught a few about the Japanese language and how to draw some kanji. This would be about the extent of the educational activities I would manage. I had the excellent job of distributing a collection of children's books that Diana bought but could not be around to hand out, and no doubt the Santa Claus element initially fixed me in the minds of the kids; however, my attempts to actually get them reading or listening to the stories, however, were feeble.

My attempts to teach capoeira were similarly limited, though not by lack of effort. Certainly I got a lot of the kids interested, they all having seen it at one point or another, but lessons usually devolved quickly, the children just kicking and jumping all over the place, the girls generally losing interest since they did not share the sometimes-aggressive enthusiasm of the boys. As such, I went from actually trying to teach technique to simply doing acrobatic movements and then challenging/daring other kids to try and mimic me, which worked fairly well. Teaching songs, on the other hand, did not. (Got to work on the pronunciation.)

Art projects would have been a better route. On a few afternoons I set kids to drawing with a couple of sets of colored pencils and crayons I had bought, and I printed out origami instructions on a couple of days to teach kids how to make cranes and butterflies. (Though it was painfully difficult to convey the necessity for precise folding, the kids were enthusiastic with this heretofore unseen art form.) Diana had spent much of her time getting kids drawing in response to read stories, making construction paper projects, or else going through a variety of theatre games.

The truth is, though, that I really didn't have to try all that hard to involve the kids in whatever activity--I even got the distinct sense that I was "the cool adult" who always had something interesting to do and to which kids looked for pronouncements of approval, a phenomenon I remember all too well from summer camp days.



At moments I was even an authority figure; my introduction of two large jump ropes started well but quickly turned into a series of disagreements and fighting over place in line and rope ownership, which produced actions merely for spite and all ended up one way or another as appeals to me along the lines of "he hit me" or "she's not sharing." I did what I could to lay down the law and comfort aggrieved parties, but christ are these kids childish! (I have learned the meaning of the word, finally; I also begin to appreciate what the adults supervising me in school went through.) Through most activities, instituting lines becomes a regular occupation of my mental energies.

More than anything, though, the kids loved to be photographed and see themselves photographed (thanks to the digital camera). Yells of "Tira foto!" would start up daily, and once started the entire community of children would continue begging "Tira foto," so excited that they would often not stop even after I finally relented. (Though I learned to blame poor lighting conditions at any point of the day to forestall photo-taking.) Mostly, the kids just wanted to act crazy for the camera, getting a kick out of how silly they could possibly look. Thankfully, they gave me an excuse to take some portraits:

Deda

She was the first kid I met, and I was impressed with her desire to learn Japanese kanji and the names of the South American countries. Older than most of the other kids, she seems to be something of the princess of the group, insistent on her getting photographed to the extent that at one point she rather forcibly drags me by the hand away from the other kids so I can take a clean picture of her. But if she wants to do something, then the others get into it too.

Marcelo

He’s the eldest of the boys I saw regularly, a leader of them and certainly the most vocal and willing to insert himself into any situation. My first pictures are of his puzzling curiosity at my camera, after which he called everyone over quite quickly to see what a fantastic thing I had.

Daniel

Wow this kid is cute. Not only does he have a pudgy round face and giant bright eyes, but he learns your name and says it endlessly with joy while asking you questions, all with a very oblivious innocence. You want to hug him very quickly.

Brena

All around nice and cute kid, really helpful to her parents.

Natalia

Always had hair like a train wreck.

Vitor

Of all the kids, Vitor is the most striking. He has a take-no-shit sort of attitude (if an eight(?) year old can be said to have one), but at the same time he is inquisitive. He speaks with a supernatural calm ahead of his age.

Fabinho

A capoeirista of sorts, as he seems proficient at some of the moves. He also held the guitar plucking it with intense joy for at least two hours the first day I had it with me.

Micaela

Of all the kids, she was most insistent and constant in yelling “Tira foto,” all the more noticeable given her slight stutter.

Marroney

Brena’s little brother. This was the only moment he didn’t have a wide-eyed confused look on his face.

(There are a bunch of other kids I didn’t get the chance to take a decent photo of, somehow: Renato, Fabricio, Tamiry, Adina, Herbert, Donato, Marcelo the older, etc. That would bring the total number of kids in the community to around 16, but I can't be sure.)

Tira Foto!

Yeah, I took a lot of photos. Below are some faves:


Marroney and his parents.


Dona Joãna, the eldest (I thin?) and most maternal community member.





Other Diversions

Since I would arrive most days around late morning, I got to sit in the shade of whatever house with many of the adults on lunch breaks, taking a strong, syrupy-sweet cup of coffee while listening to conversations or proffering my brief opinions and questions.



Diana also dropped a guitar on me to safeguard, and my first day bringing it into Pátria Livre drew no small amount of attention. After giving a couple kids a go on it, I turned it over to Markos to try out. His aimless tooling turned into a three-hour lesson by yours truly, and by the end of it he was making solid chord changes and a constant strum without too much difficulty. The guy clearly has some talent to work with, and the pleasure of this new hobby sparkled in his eyes as he smilingly told me, ”Eu fico a vontade aprender” (I have the will to learn this). I would end up leaving the guitar with him over the course of the week, checking in with him every lunch to see his progress, formalizing in his head the names of the chords and showing him new ones. (Unfortunately, my teaching him the melody to Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” though a great stimulant to his desire to learn, would result in the unceasing repetition of the baseline any moment the guitar was in his hands--was I that insufferable when I began?)

I also made myself quite curious to the community by my insistence on constructing a solar oven. Why a solar oven? While I could justifiably say that it would provide cheap, non-toxic water pasteurization or even a gas-less cooking oven, I really just wanted an excuse to try out a project I’d long been interested to make. Working from this site, I collected all 25 reais worth of materials and set about industriously my third afternoon, drawing a small crowd while I glued aluminum foil into the cardboard box. Poor cardboard for the reflector plate meant a day’s delay and yet more anticipation. I found a large sheet of heavy cardstock and set about to the finishing touches the next afternoon...and then there were clouds. And the day after. And the day after. I never really did get to try the oven out (though I could already see there would be sealing problems, and the metal absorber plate still needed to be painted black), for perhaps to spite me the normally ceaselessly sunny weather turned to great dark clouds toward the last half of the week.



My final day in the assentamento was cut short as a torrential downpour began--and would continue on and off for a couple of days. As the rain washed over the settlement, I saw Markos jump to it and begin digging trenches to try to shift a veritable creek from running directly through his house. (Thus did drainage issues come to my attention.) Without umbrella or raincoat, an exposed kilometer from the highway where I might find a bus to shuttle me to my dry hotel room, I decided to hitch a ride with an MST coordinator visiting that day. Goodbyes were hasty and haphazard, only to those around me at the moment.

I hate leaving without saying goodbye to so many. I suppose I will just have to return.

MST: Finding a Spot in the National March for Land Reform

Luck delivered me: first, my overnight bus from São Paulo happened to cross the path of the MST march less than 10km outside of the capitol, Brasília. And then, after retracing my path in a quick taxi ride, it took only 15 minutes of disoriented wandering before I ran into my one and only acquaintance at the march, Diana (quite a trick in a chaotic temporary encampment of thousands). Not half an hour later I was badged, handed a hot lunch, and for all intents and purposes an official particpant. And I still didn't quite know what I was doing there; sure, I'd just finished reading To Inherit the Earth, the best and most recent English-language book on the MST, but my Portuguese was decidedly shaky after several weeks of fraternizing in English--interviewing people about their motivations as I had planned just didn't seem realistic.

But if there's one thing I can learn from the MST, it's this: sometimes you just have to simply occupy a space, and if you hold onto it, then people will recognize your place there.

MSwhat?

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (best translated as Landless Worker's Movement) is, if not the largest, then certainly one of the largest social justice movements in the world. Counting roughly two million participants, the organization seeks to push through agrarian reform (i.e. redistribution of land ownership from a few large landholders to many small landholders) in Brasil as means of both giving livelihoods to poor people and redistributing power in Brasilian society. The MST is particularly famous because its members occupy unused plots of land owned by large landholders and tenaciously stick out intimidation and violence until the government officially recognizes them, transfering deed of the land and providing services and credit. (Interestingly, this is done in accordance to a principle written into the constitution that declares all land "not serving its social purpose" is subject to claim by those who work it.) And it has been effective: starting with its first accampamento, or occupation, in 1986, the MST is responsible for getting roughly 300,000 occupations officially recognized while pushing the issue of agrarian reform into the terms of national debate, among other accomplishments. (There is so much I could write about it, but I would direct you to the aforementioned book or their site (in Portuguese; here's an English language affiliate) to learn more.)

While I had heard the name in the US, I didn't encounter the MST until I got to the World Social Forum, and even then I didn't get to learn much, due to my language incapacities. Turns out it something of a darling among social/economic justice activists, given its effectiveness, confrontational tactics, and solid alliances with environmental and indigenous rights movements. But perhaps most impressive of all is the fact that so many poor and uneducated people are so strongly self-organized.

Organized

I have never seen such an effective operation for moving what was in fact a small city. The National March for Agrarian Reform, as it was called, was a behemoth just by the numbers:

• 12,000 marchers (arrived on 400 buses)
  
• 200+ kilometers of marching (from Goiana to Brasília) over the course of 16 days
  
• 3,000 event organizers trained, divided by sector (health, communications, discipline, etc.)
  
• 12 600-person tents and 20 200-person tents pitched every night (carried in 24 trucks)
  
• 22,000 meals delivered daily by 1,200 cooks organized into 23 kitchens (one for each state represented)
  
• 250,000 liters of water disbursed daily by 10 water trucks
  
• 100 chemical bathrooms set up daily, carried by 3 trucks
  
• 8 ambluances taking roughly 50 cases per day
  
• 3 soundtrucks and 3,000+ hand radios blaring the emissions of 1 mobile radio broadcast booth

And yet it never appeared to be anything but running smoothly. Moreover, there was a fairly standard daily schedule, which consisted of: waking anywhere between 4am and 6am, camp packed and on the road 2 hours later, walking 4 - 6 hours, pitching camp, brief rest, afternoon political discussion sessions, dinner, then free time/going to sleep.

Arrival

After taking a meal of rice & beans with the Bahia camp, I pitch my tent--which amused quite a number of people, being a single-sized mosquito net tent (called later "the tent with all the holes")--and take to wandering the camp for the day. A majority of people are dead asleep under the gigantic canvas tents; the tiredness of MST members is palpable, this being the 15th day on the road. Nevertheless, there is activity everywhere: people playing guitars, playing cards, chatting and joking, passing around giant cups of maté tea...the energy one would expect of a small city in the early afternoon.



Soon I run into a number of youth meetings, where the under-25 crowds sit in circles of political discussions and cheer contests, the latter bearing a striking resemblance to traditional "summer camp" activities. (I would be reminded of this sense time and again.) My disused Portuguese cannot keep up with it, and as the meetings dissolve into regular socializing and backflip contests, I wander off only to find a group crowded around the day's newspapers stories, which had been pasted up on the side of a bus for public viewing. Some articles are fair reportage, but others horribly and inappropriately biased (the powers-that-be have painted the organization as violent and seditious). Specifically, an impatient motorist that tried to drive through the marchers the day before got his windows broken and doors bashed in; this is the day's lede, and it elicits a constant stream of curses from each new person that comes up to read the headlines.

(If it's not appearing, just click the frame.)

Weaving in and out of different the different camps, I soon came across an interesting looking meeting and stop to listen. My presence is distinctly noticed, as I meet many sets of eyes on me, and though the meeting proceeds I am soon confronted by a fellow asking, "Hi, um, who are you?" I begin to explain, and thankfully it rapidly becomes clear that I am an oblivious foreigner. The fellow smiles, explains that it is a coordinators' meeting and implies that I seemed suspicious.

Outsider

Undoubtedly, everyone during the march viewed me with at least a little suspicion, and for good reason: no one knew me, I didn't speak Portuguese well, I often seemed lost, and I spent the first day and a half wearing a corporate-branded bandana on my head (I was shamed into removing it during the march, and I would find out later that more than one person had thought poorly of it.) More to the point, I was a foreigner (an estadunidense!), but unlike all the other foreigners I wasn't making a documentary or writing a news article, so why the heck would I want to be there? (Apparently the US consul had recently made an investigation into possible links between the MST and the FARC guerrillas in Colombia--a silly idea if you know thing one about the MST--and so there was a fear of "spies.") Thank goodness Diana was there to vouch for me, or else I might have been frozen out.

I met Diana in Salvador. At the time she was living in Vila Brandão, the same neighborhood as Avery. We only hung out a couple of times, but I was duly impressed by her: a Brown University student from Oklahoma making a documentary about participatory budgeting in a city in Bahia, she had come upon a nearby MST settlement and made connections there, and so was making a mini-documentary on that as well. I had e-mailed her on a whim, asking for help in making contacts at the march, only to hear that she herself had decided to go. I would end up using her cachet with everyone (and superior language skills) to make friends and get involved. (She would also be the key in my coming to visit MST encampments around Vitória da Conquista, where I currently write from.) And we would become friends, too, she glad to have another English speaker about for relfection's sake.


Culture

As the sun went down and I left the coordinator's meeting to wander aimlessly back among the camps, I heard group singing and followed the voices to have a look. Before I knew it, I had been ushered into the circle and handed a song sheet. At the head of the circle were several baskets of bread wreathed in flowering thrushes, accompanied by an open Bible and candles. Everyone was singing hymns (one went "the love of Jesus spreads over the land and inundates my being"); the ceremony was quite Christian in its appeals to Jesus, but otherwise had a sort of omnireligious sense to it. Then, a candle was passed around, each person taking a turn to ask a gift of the Lord (unity, fortitude, things like that)--scrambling for something in my vocabulary, the best I could come up with was o dom da alegria, happiness. Then the bread was distributed, and happily munching my somewhat sacred snack, I wandered off again, knowing only that it was probably a prayer of thanks for food.


This would be the first of many encounters with mística, a form of spirituality specific to the MST that mixes Christianity with farm-oriented symbolism and mysticism. The ceremonies and rites are created by the MST members themselves, and it demands creativity since there does not seem to be an institutional framework. Mística does not purport to replace the institutional Christianities here in Brasil, but given that churches are not usually accessible from MST settlements, my educated guess is that it was a spontaneous melding of the movement's principles and the spiritual needs of settlers.

Which reminds me to say: the MST is a culture. It is by nature community-oriented, in that the occupations are active creation of new communities, and the organizational hierarchy is based on these units. It is old enough now that there are children who have grown up in the movement, who learned to read by primers on agrarian reform. The innumerable MST-specific songs, mística, and ideologically-themed art and theatre I encountered impressed on me just how much creativity a is part of the movement. Combined with the "way of life" principles--nonviolence, temperance, consensus decision-making, gender equality, etc--you've got something that can encapsulate most parts of everyday living. (I wonder if unions in 1920s & 30s USA were not unlike this.)

A little bit of political theatre...

The summer camp feeling especially came home to me as I walked back to my tent past an outdoor screen showing a documentary on current President Lula's activist days, abounding campfires with the inevitable maté being passed, and small groups playing pagode and forró and music with a few dancers. It occurs to me that this is the social event of the year, too.

The First Day of Marching

That night I opted to rest up for my first day on the asphalt, laying myself down at 9pm. Unfortunately, the night got colder than expected; layered with three shirts and wrapping another around my head, I still woke up cramped into the fetal position (bastard who sold me the sleeping bag in São Paulo did not know what he was talking about). During brief moments of waking in the wee hours, I hear a constant chorus of cougs resounding across the camp, as if like crickets in a field. Everyone is sick to some extent, and I'm just finding out why.

I wake at 6am to raucous cheers responding each time to a repeatedly bullhorned, "Bom dia o pessoal do Sul!" (Good morning people of the South!). By the time I dazedly drag myself out of the tent, I notice that in the frenzy of activity around me, most people fully dressed and packed. I break my little camp double-time and head to the amassed groups readying to march, skipping breakfast...only to wait around for an hour, doing nothing. The reason? A decision made to wait until 8:30am so as not to disrupt traffic for the lower-class workers driving into the city (the reasoning being that the only people on the road after that time are upper-class, not needing to be in before 9am).


The march goes forth in three single-file lines, organized by state. I march with Bahia, which has been issued t-shirts for the occasion (yay for schwag) and goes second. Nearly everyone is wearing the signature vermilion MST baseball hat, and every third person seems to be carrying a similarly crimson flag. It's then that I notice everyone also has standard-issue backpacks. That's a manicured public image, if I may say so. I also notice some of the marchers carrying their sheathed machetes on their belts and am briefly reminded of the universal military tradition and prestige of carrying swords. Farmer pride, I suppose.


A lot of people are wearing flip-flops. I realize that they have been for 200 kilometers. Ouch.

Though the soundtrucks boom a nonstop of speeches and songs (might I add that MST protest songs are melodi and feature interesting rhythms--US activists could use some help on this front), they are far apart and not near my section of the march. The marchers themselves are largely quiet, besides the occasional cheer instigated by a "Viva XXXX!" People look tired after two weeks of this, and entering the capitol doesn't seem to be pumping them up at all. I notice some teenaged marchers flipping through a tattoo catalogue en route. The rush of traffic provides ambient noise to fill the silence.

Yet there is activity. Vendors of picolé (fruit popsicles), scurry along the sides of the column, attempting to keep pace and make more than a few midday-sun-inspired sales. Meanwhile, documentary-makers (of which there are at least a dozen) weave in and out, foward and back, dropping to the asphalt for that tunnel-zoomed shot of everyone in file. Reporters also show up frequently, though I learn that only communication coordinators are allowed to talk to them--message discipline, no doubt an adaptation to the generally hostile press coverage that surely jumps on anything. Radios in peoples' hands transmit the soundtruck speeches, and "discipline" teams roam to make sure no one is screwing up the formation or wandering into traffic. (Did I mention the MST is organized?)

We arrive on the grounds of the city stadium, our home for the next days. The march ends at noon--a short day, I am told (stories of a previous 9-hour day make me cringe). The procession finishes with a gathering in front of the soundtrucks, on top of which speechmakers thank the main organizers, give one last rally (we have arrived!), and even thank the assisting police officers who accompanied the march--one even gives a speech! (I'm just not used to seeing protestors and police publicly interacting in a friendly manner.)

Settling in

The giant tents are up by the time we get there, and almost everyone goes straight to their sleeping rolls. Full of energy due to my having skipped the previous two weeks of marching, I take to wandering. Vendors swarm gradually, creating a fair-like atmosphere. Casual litter appears multiplied by 12,000 appears almost immediately.

I find Diana and accompany her and another MST kid in search of public showers, which are found in the Parque Cidade nearby. Surrounded by weekenders working out and jogging in their bathing suits, I feel incredibly out of place in my dirty jeans and movement-emblazoned shirt. I quickly wash my hair under an outdoor showerhead and leave.

Trudging back to camp, my head begins to get foggy. Too much sun for me, and I end up spending the afternoong sitting in the shade and willing my headache not to become debilitating. I begin to understand the endemic tiredness, though I assume the MST members are used to the sun: the non-black members sport deep tanned skin, and everyone old and young seems to have a vague wrinkling in their faces. When I shake hands, I grip palms and fingers hardened and made jagged by calluses. And everyone seems to be pretty fit. The farming life, embodied.

It is at this point that it also finally hits me just how racially diverse the MST is. The distinct racial differences of the regions of Brasil are thrown together and come into stark contrast here like nowhere else (north and northeast darker skinned, south and west lighter skinned). To see my own resemblance in the white skin and European features of some of the membership breaks down the "otherness" for me--something that I find incredibly difficult to overcome in other countries and in pro-poor movements. Cohorting with Bahia, I am an outsider at first glance, but in the general mix of the movement, no one would have reason to suspect I'm not a member.

The afternoon is pleasant introductions and conversation. I manage to meet all the foreigners in the Bahia camp: beyond Diana, there's Célia, a Swiss-English woman working as gender issues coordinator for Bahia state, and Giorgio, an Italian who has been helping out on accampamentos in southern Bahia. The English language conversation is refreshing after a day of not being able to say much. I go and by a crate of pinha fruits to split with the gathering many, in the process meeting several of the people Diana knows from her time in Bahia.

Summer Camp!

After watching a live news broadcast from in front of the Bahia camp, I grab oily snacks with Diana and we head over to the youth rally on the other side of camp. Everyone under 25 has come out and crowded in front of a trio elétrico, and the atmosphere is that of a party about to happen. I am excited to shake it with a bunch of people my age.

The rally turns out to be speeches and songleading mixed with musical interludes; it appears that people are there mostly for dancing during the musical interludes. I get to hear a solid lineup of MST rally songs, but the one that I end up hearing endlessly (and thus learning) is the Hymn of the March:

"Brasil em fileira" Marchar novamente é preciso Para manter a esperança Do povo sofrido e cansado Mas pra lutar não se cansa Em frente ó povo oprimido Homens mulheres crianças REFRÃO: Marcha com a gente marcha É o Brasil em fileira O sonho não é utopia No tremular das bandeiras Preste atenção meu pais Desperta pra realidade O que está acontecendo No campo e na cidade Só a força popular Mudará a sociedade REFRÃO

"Brasil lined up" It is necessary to march again In order to maintain the hope Of a suffering and tired People But we do not tire of fighting In front of an oppressed People Are men, women, and children CHORUS: March with us*, march We are Brasil lined up The dream is not a utopia Found in the waving of flags Pay attention, my country Wake up to reality Of what is happening In the countryside and in the city Only a popular force Will change society CHORUS

* This a very common, colloquial way of saying "we" that literally means "the people."

In the speeches and some of the songs I'm able to discern the common themes: we (the poor) are Brasil, we are latinos, fight neoliberalism (specifically the USA and IMF), fight the bourgeoisie, Che Guevara, land and services now, yay for socialism. There's even some robotic fist-pumping to anthems that makes me twinge. I am curious about the rhetorical flourishes on socialism, since the movement itself is more or less about redistributing land within a market system. My guess is that socialism here is a convenient oppositional term to the capitalism of Brasil, which has thrived on entrenched inequality, but I do not really know. Something to ask about in the future.

I remember that, to many of the kids, this is the biggest social event of the year. It looks as though quite a few of the teenagers and young adults have saved a clean set of "hip," clubby clothes for just this night. The atmosphere is distinctly that of "last night at summer camp," with everyone getting ready to part ways and consequently expectations abounding, i.e. everyone's cruising for a hookup. With political speeches.

Too tired from sun to be socially adventurous, I head back to my tent and am able to pass out effortlessly despite the thumping bass of a trio blasting forró not 100 meters away.

Occupying the Capitol

I am surprised to wake up at 8am--it's late! And it looks like quite a number of people are groggy from the previous night's celebrations (apparently the liquor vendors made a killing). An assembly for Bahia camp is called, where after songs and chants the rundown of the day's schedule is announced along with a motivational speech by an MST member-cum-deputado (congressman). Shirts and hats are distributed for the day (more schwag!), and then waiting begins anew. I fill the time with several slightly confusing, well-meaning conversations.

After 11:30am rice and beans, the line up starts: Bahia will lead the pack (as the largest contingent attending). At noon the trios blare the hymn, a giant cheer goes up, and we begin moving forward, three lines as before.


Walking down the main highway into town, there's a surprisingly small police presence (in the US, this kind of thing would feature an officer on every corner). We finally have onlookers when we get toward the center of town, some of whom prove quite supportive, clapping and shouting support. Nearly every spectator is taking pictures: no doubt we are something of curios event to some. Unfortunately, this proves to be a short-lived phenomenon, as Brasília is a city designed to be as inhospitable to pedestrian traffic as is possible by means of modernist city-planning (though more on that in another post).

The first destination of the march is the US Embassy. After winding our way through deserted streets, we come to what appears to be a barracks. It appears so due to the stron contingent of military police and horse-mounted cops creating a wide perimeter in front of the embassy. The march just hangs a u-turn, with everyone dropping their trash as a sign of disrespect and, in the words of one marcher, "to take back the garbage they produce." A banner calling George Bush a terrorist is unfurled and put on display. (My opinion is that this gets way off message in an otherwise rhetorically algined program, but it's not my movement.)


The march snakes back folded on itself until the lead part hooks a turn into...a parking garage? We actually end up travelling under one of the Ministries, using their highway access to avoid a roundabout route. (I only mention this because the effect of marching through a parking garage is to feel unbearably silly.) Back on the main highway, the march arrives at the congressional plaza and makes its way around the circuit of adjacent federal buildings. Because the march is 6 kilometers long, there is a stretch of time where the buildings of federal power are entirely encircled by red MST flags.



The march ends at the Ministry of Farming, affording a break to us while we wait an hour for the tail of the march to come in. A large placard is erected in front of the Ministry (considered to be conservative) displaying the American bald eagle with Brasil in its talons, as well as a sign proclaiming the Ministry as property of the IMF. Music, MST organizer speeches, non-MST business-suited important people making speeches--unfortunately, I just can't follow it, so I end up talking to a student from Santa Catarina and snacking relentlessly. Reporters swarm everywhere.


After a bit, there is a general call to head to the lawn in front of Congress, where four stages are set up to show political theatre. The crowds are intense, so I wander down to the middle of the lawn to gaze at the Congress building in the sunset. I am struck by the aesthetic of the entire scene: on one side, a monochrome imperial-looking modernist monolith of a building lined by motionless riot officers at set intervals; on the other, a tangled mas of red flags and shirts stirring vigorously. More and more people peel off from the theatres to go down to the moat in front of Congress and rally.

Why does this remind me of Star Wars (Empire vs Rebels)?


At some point, the crowd of people on the far side next to the Congress condenses and begins to move rapidly in one direction, the kind of movement that can only be associated with trouble of some sort. I learn later that marchers have surrounded a police car that tried to drive through the lines to the Congressional plaza, and as the car tries to back out that marchers continue to surround it and bang on the sides. People all around the lawn begin running toward the commotion--I have found that Brasilians often run toward the scene of an accident or trouble--and it is not long before a detachment of horse-mounted cops charge into the crowd. I can only see objects being thrown before there is a rush of people running away, i.e. towards me. Fuck. "Calma!" I yell, hoping that my cool convinces people to stop stampeding, though it is not necessary since everyone turns right around and runs back toward the confrontation. This happens several times as a cycle: run to, confront, run from. A police helicopter buzzes the crowd to disperse it, blowing my hat off me head. That's when I decide I'm too hungry and tired to care about being there anymore, and I notice more columns of officers advancing on the far side of the field. As I walk away, the sound of speeches and festivities from the trios continues uninterrupted.

Morning After

Waking up is a several stage process. Since some people start at 4am, it is a trick of deciphering when the noise level is sufficient to signal the actual beginning of the activites. After three or four false rises, I pop out my earplugs at 7am to hear the cheers of "o pessoal do Sul." Low-angle sunrays make the morning chill bearable. After a trip to the Parque Cidade with the foreigner crew yields a hot shower (in which I learn just ho sunburnt I am), an assembly is called in the nearby municipal arena to announce the results of negotiations between the MST and the government (which were occuring as the events of the previous day unfolded).

After state by state cheers and interminable playing of the Hymn, a mística begins on the arena floor. A brief parade of the MST banner is followed by the live construction of the stage: the stage is labelled "agrarian reform," and each support brought out to raise it up has a principle written on it (communication, resistance, spirit of sacrifice, discipline, etc). Clever symbolism. This is followed by a procession of members old and young, black and white, male and female, who ascend the stage an light a torch on top of a vaulted globe. With the lighting of the fire, banners drop from the globe with higher principles written on them (justice, liberty, equality, participation) and small placard with "socialism" on top of it all. The globe's sides fold out and all sorts of goodies (books, food, balloons, etc) are ejected from it, a symbolic cornucopia. It is not like anything I have seen before, insofar as its otherwise over-the-top symbolism is made effective by the extremely demonstrative and serious atmosphere.


Then the presentation of negotiation's results: it seems that concrete steps were lacking, and instead a continuation of promises predominated. Here's what the original demands were (in Portguese only, I'm afraid). The results:

• continuation of promise to recognize officially (i.e. provide services to) 115,000 more settlements, bringing to 400,000 the total number of recognized settlements by 2006
• a change in the methodology for measuring land productivity in pro-poor terms
• promise to extend new lines of credit for settlement families
• a promise of favorable restructuring of the agency in charge of settlement recognition
• opening 1,300 jobs to expand said agency

Meanwhile, press coverage has predictably put almost all of its emphasis on the brief confrontation between the marchers and the police the night before, with a lede quote from the head of the police proclaiming that "an invasion of the Congress building" was prevented. But most everyone thought the march was successful in keeping the issues alive in national political debate. More than anything, I get the sense they are just happy to be going home.

UPDATE: BBC News had an article, as well as Common Dreams, which talks about things more generally than my account.

The Most Important Part is in the Postscript

Giorgio decides to head to Salvador, leaving a vacant seat on one of the buses back to Bahia. After hearing about Diana's experiences and receiving friendly entreaties from some of the MST members, I decide, "Why not?" and hop on the bus.

21 hours in the bus from hell. I have come down with a cold, an inevitability of cold nights and hanging out with thousands of people minus reasonable sanitation. The bus itself seems to have no shocks left, which means I feel every bump doubly from my seat way in the back of the bus, next to the stinky bathroom. My seat is itself broken and listing to the right, dumping my legs into the aisle, which everyone trips over on their way to the stinky bathroom. Meanwhile, it turns out we travel down one of the most unmaintained sections of highway in Brasil, potholes the size of swimming pools I swear; I am literally tossed forward out of my seat a few times. Naturally, this horrible section of road happens only from 11pm to about 5am, meaning I get no sleep, except in 10 minute intervals intermittently. My headrest is sized for a shorter person, thereby putting a nasty crick in my neck, and the constant bouncing makes my knees sore (since my legs are extended out into the aisle to brace myself). I sit next to a guy who takes up one and a half seats and rebuffs my attempts at conversation. And on top of it all, I feel bad because the MST members have no money and so cannot eat when the bus driver makes stops for mealtimes.

But now I am in Vitória da Conquista in the southwest of Bahia state, visiting settlements and getting involved. You stick somewhere long enough, and people will recognize your place there.

MST: Seja Bem Vindo

[While I'm writing up the march in the meantime, I want to post what's happening with me currently so that it doesn't fall into the deep forgotten.]

Today was such an excellent first big day on the assentamento.

I stepped off the bus and headed out onto a dirt path away from the highway, toting a guitar and a bag of children's books that Diana had picked out. The sky was cerulean and dotted with clouds, a cool breeze coming across the hills to temper the otherwise relentless sun (remarkably like a summer day in northern California). As I walked the kilometer out to the settlement, I rehearsed a few of sentences I knew I would have to say, after which I let the sound of the wind fill my ears. Quiet. I realized how little time I had spent outside of cities while here.

Being a Sunday, I arrived to find the camp serene, with a few people sitting in the scarce shade next to their shacks. A few bom dias and small talk later, I was sitting with Markos on a shaded bench in front of his house, trying to remember the names of all the kids that were amassing as I began to distribute the books. Diana had written personal notes to each child on the inside cover, and as I read them out I received grins of a width and genuineness I haven't seen in ages. Between my cachet as a friend of Diana, who spent two months here, and the Santa Claus factor of the book distribution, I started out quite well-received.

Attention quickly turned to the guitar, and I could barely put in a couple of riffs before kids were reaching to touch the strings. A short guitar lesson soon entailed with one of the kids, and more introductions followed as several of the adults came by to see what was making the music. (There aren't any instruments in the assentamento--this will change soon, once I can gather the materials.) Every "seja bem vindo" put a fresh smile on my face.

Markos' wife Julia cooked a lunch, and over a plate of rice, beans, farofa, and egg I dished out questions about the infrastructure and worklife of the assentamento. By the time my plate was empty, I pitched the idea of a solar oven (for water purification) and made plans to work alongside the community in the coffee fields the following day (they operate on a collective basis). We continued a stop-and-start conversation (due to my still-recovering Portuguese) as we took syrupy sweet cafezinho at a neighbor's house: talk of differences in the minimum wages of the US and Brasil prompt not a few expressions of dismay.

Back in the diminishing shade of Markos' place, I put to teaching him the basics. The guy's a natural--inside three hours he's putting down relatively fast chord changes with a steady strum. His joy is nearly palpable, and he expresses to me how much he would like to continue learning. (Though the guitar is borrowed, I have a feeling that the original owner may be willing to part with it.) Brothers Romilson and Rafael gather round too, and after a quick breaking out of the world atlas to clear up confusion about my origins, we move to another house to take into account the shifting sunlight, talking of music and English words. A brief trip to the bathroom accompanied by one of the kids leads to a brief rock-throwing contest and cartwheels; I think a capoeira class is in order.

Everyone turns giddy when I teach Markos the melody to "No Woman No Cry" (did I mention that Bob Marley is bigger than Jesus here?), who continues to repeat it endlessly until I head out in the sunset to catch a bus back to town. On the dirt track out to the highway, I run into some of the kids coming back from a daytrip. Deda, seemingly the most gifted of the kids, offers me some unidentified berries from a sprig she is carrying. "É comistível?" She nods, smiles. I clasp three in my hand and bid them a tchau, singing Bob Marley to myself, positively giddy.

Postscript

I reach the highway spitting. Turns out those berries are astringent motherfuckers.

And moving on some more...

Ack, life runs faster than my typing. Now in the interior of Bahia state after a few intense days with the MST, just had a wonderful day out in the countryside on an MST encampment. I'm planning to stick around and lend a hand, play with the kids. I'm happy. This is exactly what coming to Brasil was about.

More details to come when I next get to bring my compy to the internet cafe.

Moving On...

Spent my last few days hanging out with Dave and Andrea. On Tuesday I snuck back into the apartment to help Dave throw a surprise party for Andrea, who had just gotten back from a month in Africa working for the Global Youth Action Network (her new employer). Suffice to say the look on her face was priceless. It was really rejuvenating to be with them, speaking English and connecting on more than the surface level that has predoimnated by social interactions in Brasil. It got too comfortable, though, speaking English all the time and living in a place that reminded me more of NYC than any other place in Brasil.

So I got to going, and have just arrived on the outskirts of Brasília on an overnight bus from São Paulo and met up with the MST national march, after which I will probably be going to an accampomento somewhere in Bahia. Hopefully I can actually get to writing it up at some point.