A Brazillion and One Excuses .... by Adam (2006)

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     It takes more than a few dozen vocabulary words to snuff out poverty. I know this because recently I’ve been on academic practicum in Brazil, executing my secret plan to eradicate global injustice. It’s been harder than I predicted.

I arrived in October and my first few days were chock full of gloom as I settled in and began tabulating my excuses for unhappiness and failure. I began with the fact that I had no real project, office or co-worker. I was actually sent on the abstract mission of creating a ‘video strategy’ for a four-year UBC slum-related governance project. My initial contacts were so excited by my arrival that they each spent three weeks scrutinizing my emails before replying with a friendly “I no speak English. Good luck for you.”

This led me to my most lucrative excuse of all – my linguistic inabilities. Shocked to find out that they don’t speak Thai in Brazil, I immediately began studying Portuguese by sitting in the dark, staring through the bars on the windows of my new apartment. I had no one to practice with – no roommate (away for most of my first three weeks), no coworkers and no friends (this is the part where you well up in sympathy). All I had were the bedbugs (who don’t speak Portuguese but have been leaving Lisbon-sized welts all over my torso and legs) and the other Canadian student Dan, whose language skills seem to rival C3PO’s.

My ability to absorb new languages seems to be on par with one of the less advanced primate suborders. I can mimic grunts and return hand gestures, but grammar has mostly failed me. However, after minutes and minutes of practice, I have improved, and can now speak Portuguese as ably as a Brazilian (provided that this Brazilian has recently undergone major throat surgery or was born less than six weeks ago).

I live in Belo Horizonte – which I gather is the Edmonton of Brazil. My dreams of cavorting around in sunglasses and a lime-brown G-string were nixed as I discovered there is no water in BH. Instead, it is an interior city – Brazil’s third biggest municipality – bound by rolling hills.

I live with a Brazilian woman. She is very nice. However, I am still adjusting to the absence of a seat on our toilet. In Brazil, it seems, toilet seats are viewed with suspicion, as extraneous gimmickry. Why sit on a clean, plastic oval, they reason, when you can fasten your bum directly onto cold porcelain? And the benefits of self cleaning are evident as rims are kept polished by the brush of each successive occupant’s muff. But I am not entirely convinced of these arguments. Therefore I like to leave the rim speckled with urine, as a reminder to my roommate that my culture is more advanced than hers.

One issue I have with the seatless toilet, is that my rear end is several times smaller than that of my thickset roommate’s. While she is not in danger of falling into the bowl, I live in constant fear of collision with my floating works of toilet brown. (She, alternatively, may be at risk of gulping the entire appliance into her rectum if she stands up too quickly. Luckily the toilet seems firmly bonded to the bathroom floor.) Thus far, I have stayed dry by securing my thighs with shampoo bottles and toothpaste.

I have had a few good conversations with my roommate. She speaks not a word of English and at first she gives off a bit of a Down’s Syndrome vibe (also known as “Sindrome de Down”, here in Brazil. Based on random street-side inspections, I conclude that one in three Brazilians is a member of the D-Team. (Last week I donated a chromosome, in hopes of upgrading that statistic.). Actually, she is normal but for her eyes. Encircling each lid is a three-inch black ring, creating a safety trench of sorts, perhaps to protect the eyeballs from ants or bedbugs. Actually these circles seem to be common among Brazilians. Perhaps it’s like black teeth in Japan: a sign of royal lineage. But she has been very kind. Each morning she wakes up and shouts Portuguese phrases at me while I eat my cornflakes.

Many customs here are quite different from our Canadian way. For example, some people shower outside. During my first week, a deep and rhythmic moaning drifted up to my fourth floor window. I positioned a stool in the bathroom to peer out the window in search of the source of this sexy exaltation. Instead of the masturbatory activities I thought I might find, I looked down on an obese male, basking in the rapture of rinsing conditioner from his back hair. 

Restaurant food here is often buffet style, with your plate weighed and charged per gram. Most dishes consist of rice and beans with meat lumps. The national dish is Feijoada, which is essentially more rice and beans, but this time mixed with the most dubious cuts of pork. It was traditionally a dish slaves made from the scraps they were given by owners. Thus slaves apparently made yummy food, but in other ways their lives were probably awful (I think they were seldom given positive feedback from managers, for example).

I always have to constantly remind myself that things move slowly here in Brazil. In the early days, I felt my impact was about as useful to the project as a bowlful of hairs is to a thirsty baby. But things are getting more meaningful and exciting as I meet more people. I’ve always been blessed with the ability to pull decent products out of my ass at the last minute (I keep most of my Christmas gifts up there too). And the overall project is cool. UBC is working with five Brazilian cities to improve social and environmental problems by working with other municipalities and levels of government in legal consortia.

Last week the project organisers came to BH for meetings and site visits. I sat in on the strategic planning, although I didn’t have much to say as I have never created a ‘new public consortia for metropolitan governance’ before. Well, I’ve never done it in Portuguese, anyway. My contribution to the session peaked when I handed someone the marker they had gestured towards.

Most of the people on the project are fantastic, but my jury is still out on our Canadian contact based in Brazil. He is supposedly from the same country as me, but I have never heard him speak English. I think he thinks he is Brazilian, in the way that the pot-bellied ex-pats in Thailand think they are Thai because they know how to request a hand-job in the local language.

But he has a gaggle of fans at the municipality in BH. While never speaking a word to me during his stay, he had the prefeitura girls (city staff) giggling with delight. He tells his stock comical story (something about being bloodied by thorns while boating – sounds hilarious to me) while the girls twist their hair in knots and fling their heads backward in practiced hysterics. Then they all kiss each other and eat beans and hunks of meat. (All Brazilian customs terminate with beans, meat and open-mouth kissing.)

I apparently secured my own potential girlfriend while visiting one of the shelter sites (the project in BH focuses on gender violence). The gender point-person for the town of Sabara could be comfortably placed in either gender category. I peg her as just under seven-feet tall, with the countenance of an ape and the gait of a wookie. She is pregnant, which appears to suggest some genital contact with a male at a point in her history.

Her sister is almost as tall, with just as much extra padding, but glamorous in a Posh Beckham sort of way. Apparently she developed a crush on me and snuck her phone number into the hand of our project director, urging me to give her a call. I was oblivious to her feelings. Although when I think back, she did greet me and say goodbye with revealing ‘triple kisses’. And she certainly requested the use of my dictionary quite a bit. Several times she positioned herself behind me, lips exploring my ear as she whispered “dicionario please” in long, moist syllables. I didn’t think much of it at the time, other than, “hey, this is a gal who likes to translate.”

Anyway, I need to get back to my very flexible working hours. Next week I leave to visit the projects in Recife and Fortaleza. And now that I have courageously overcome (or given into) all my adversities, I am bereft of excuses and need to start creating some worthy output. So I will go now and reach up into my vault-of-quality-products and fish around for something valuable to complete before I return in December.