thanksgiving

We had the day off on Thursday, so we went into the historic part of Salvador. We saw the church of São Fransisco, which is entirely walled with gold.


We took the Elevador Lacerda down to the Lower City,


where we did some shopping at the Mercado Modelo.



Then we had Thanksgiving dinner.

black awareness

In honor of Black Awareness Day, or Conciência Negra, which Brazil observes on November 20, our school invited a cultural group from the Japanese consulate to do a presentation for the students.

First, we were subjected to an off-key rendering of the Japanese national anthem and an excruciating PowerPoint presentation.

Did you know, for example, that Japanese people enjoy hot baths? Or Japan has really fast trains?

Then some people dressed in face masks and robes hit each other with long sticks.

Then people with headbands played some big drums.

Then there was a dance performance, but I snuck out before that, so I have no pictures of it.

There were also tables set up with Japanese tchotchkes.

Now you're probably asking yourself, what does all this have to do with Black Awareness?

If you come up with anything, let me know, because I personally have no idea.

the blogger takes a walk

Still Life with Spider Plant and Hubcaps

Something else I've been thinking about lately is walking. The latest issue of Poetry magazine has a feature called "The Poet Takes a Walk." I'm particularly partial to A.E. Stalling's essay "Athens: Peripatetic Fragments."

I'm working on a longer essay about it myself, but thought I'd share a couple of still lives (still lifes?) that I took on a recent stroll around the condominium.

And a quote from Peter Cole's essay, Jerusalem, in that same issue:

"Walking is a way of deferring arrival, but also a way of making it possible."

Still Life with Bananas and Rusty Bicycle

grounds

The two groundskeepers here, Fraga and Laurentino, put poison in the anthills near the playground.

Fraga: short, white, mustachioed. He's worked here for more than twenty years. He arrives at 5:30, and lugs a bucket and hose up to the cars, which residents pay him extra to wash. At noon he naps on a bench in the shade.


Laurentino: tall, black, taciturn, always a rake in his hand, always muttering something under his breath. He rides his bike here every morning down the road with no shoulder, cars careening past.


The poison is no big deal, Fraga assured us. He sinks the pump in, then covers the hole and tamps the dirt down.

Plus, he hadn't done it in awhile. Sure, they'd let us know when and where they did it.

Then yesterday another neighbor saw Laurentino applying the formicide again, without warning.

They also apply fertilizer with a liberal hand. The grass is lush--almost disturbingly so.


This morning, in fact, I saw Laurentino sprinkling the granules like confectioner's sugar in front of our house.

Who gives them orders? Who makes the decision to do these things? It's all rather unclear.

There are community meetings, but the final say comes down to the síndico, an elected representative who makes all the rules, pretty much at will.

And while the decision lies with the síndico, it would appear that the application of the substances is completely unregulated, delegated to the whims of Fraga and Lourentino.

At least a few neighbors are also up in arms. Not that there's much hope of changing things.

I find this almost unspeakably infuriating. It elicits a powerless, seething frustration in me. If I didn't have kids--who play in the grass and dirt, then stick their fingers in their mouths--I could brush it off.

As it is, all I can do, aside from talk to the síndico, is yell at the boys to keep their hands out of their mouths, and pretend it isn't happening.

Now, I am someone who, in the States, had the list of pesticide-laden crops memorized, who had a food shopping routine that involved Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and numerous csa's and organic farm shares. We used vinegar and baking soda for cleaning. We didn't use bath products with artificial fragrances or toys with pthalates.

And, yes, Brazil has forced me to relax my standards.

But where do you draw the line? The kids have more sugar than I'd like, with Dete's cake and mucunzá, the birthday parties at school and the snacks that R. sneaks from neighbors' houses.

I refuse to let them have soda, though. We don't have any white flour or white rice in the house, or any packaged food.

I'd also rather not let them nibble on ant poison and fertilizer.

What would you do? Seriously, I am at a loss.

At what point is it just another downside of life in a developing nation, at which I shrug my shoulders and sigh, then move on?

At what point am I endangering my family?

enclosures

Since we've arrived in Brazil, I've been thinking a lot about enclosures.

We live in a walled condominium. It's maybe one square mile: a cobblestone driveway that winds from the gate, up a slope to the block of attached houses where we live. There's a swimming pool; a small playground and a bigger one; a soccer field at the bottom of a hill rimmed with cashew and banana trees.

Beyond is a world where cars and buses sit without moving on the Paralela, heat rising in waves from the asphalt, where a tourist is killed in his hotel room and a health department truck releases plumes of pesticide into the air.

I go days inside these walls, leaving only to go to work, driving from one gated space to another.

Early in the morning, I run laps around the soccer field, up and down the driveways. In the evenings, the men drink beer, women sit on benches and nurse their babies, older children swing from the monkey bars.

Everyone leaves their doors unlocked.


We have a Tuesday evening yoga class on the soccer field. There's a seamstress who lives here, who'll hem pants or patch a hole. A neighbor's maid gives manicures. There's a pharmacy that delivers. (One evening I came outside to see the neighbors sitting on the grass eating ice cream bars that they'd had delivered.) You can even call and have someone come to your house to vaccinate your kids.

Sometimes at night, after the children are asleep, I lie in the hammock and listen to the wind in the palm trees.

Behind the wall is the mato: the dunes of Abaeté, a blank expanse. A horse grazes at its edge. A boy gathers firewood. A man who grabs the purse of a maid waiting at the bus stop disappears into the scrub. A vulture settles onto a high branch.

It's a strange, suspended feeling, safety edged with broken glass.

How long can I live like this? Not forever.

But there are advantages. In the afternoon, when the sun is just beginning to dip behind the walls, I take the boys for a swim.

I tip my head back, and the splashing and shouting disappears, and for a moment I can enjoy floating in this calm, blue world.

bisa

This is our neighbor, Bisa.

I don’t know what her real name is, but everyone calls her Bisa, which means Great-Grandma.

At first I thought she was related to most of the kids in the condominium, and it turns out she is related to several. (Though I haven’t yet unraveled all the relationships of all the people who flow in and out of the different houses.)

Then I heard Dete telling the baby, as she carried him inside, “Say hi to your Bisa, Ju Ju.”

Bisa lives with another old woman whom everyone calls Vovó (Grandma), although they both appear equally ancient.

I think of them as the gallery, kind of like the two grumpy old men in the balcony on the Muppet Show.

They’re always sitting on the porch, offering a commentary on whatever’s going on. When R. comes in screaming, pulling on my leg, they nod wisely, and say, ciumes. He’s jealous.

The baby’s drooling, Bisa likes to point out. Teeth are coming. Any day now.

And they both like to remind me about the time when R. got their laundry all wet playing with water in back of our house.

Earlier this week, Dan discovered R. sneaking up to Bisa and smacking her on the shin.

Why, R.? Why?

Who knows?

Mortified, Dan apologized to the old lady, and made R. apologize.

Bisa muttered something in her toothless Portuguese, and went back to her newspaper. But now she has something else to add to her litany of grievances.

country of the future

Copyright 2007, The New York Times Company

Yesterday I woke up at five to go wait in line for several hours at the Labor Department with another teacher to get more paperwork. When we arrived, the line was already around the block, but we were only about thirty people back, since the school had paid someone to wait for us.

We waited outside until the office opened at eight. Then we waited inside until they called our numbers.

Overall, it wasn't too terrible a trip. There was only one spelling error, which required an extra hour or so of waiting. And we came away with the little slips we needed so we could come back in next week and wait in line again to pick up the documents.

At least we didn't arrive at six in the morning, like the people who went today did, to find the Labor Department on strike.

That's the funny thing about this country. Anything seems as likely as anything else to happen. You may show up and everything goes smoothly. You may show up and they say your ID card is too frayed, go home. You may show up and the Labor Department's on strike.

Or, as happened earlier this week in Brazil, you may go to a funeral and find the deceased walk up, quite alive, to attend the festivities.

Ah, Brazil. Place where anything can happen.

As the saying goes: it's the country of the future--and always will be.