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I bought a plane ticket today. My semester’s over, and I’m getting ready to travel for the next 40 days. Terrifyingly, most of the details still need to be worked out. And I leave Monday. But it’ll work out sometime.

Things have ended and continue ending on a good note. Classes put on just enough academic pressure to let me know it was the end of the semester, but not enough to cause real stress. I’m the proud author of a 10-page paper on São Paulo’s subway system. Sivan left last Thursday and since then it’s been pure goodbyes and memories whenever I get together with friends from this semester, mostly other study abroad students. People are trickling out of the city, and, other than that, I’ve just got my own planning to do.

Last weekend, my host mom and brother went to Rio de Janeiro (an hour flight away) for a wedding and were going to return there again this weekend for another commitment there. Well, they had too bad of weather to come back on their originally planned flight so they just decided to stay the week in Rio. Unfortunately, that means I’m in the house alone for a week, but the neighbor and maid are taking good care of me and Eiku (the dog). Haha I’m incompetent in an American kitchen stocked with food. Imagine me in an empty Brazilian kitchen – I’m useless. To top it off, for the first few days my family was gone, the natural gas was cut off in my building because they were installing new pipes. It was ugly.

On the subject of food and shelter, winter has arrived. I doubt it’s ever made it below 40, but I tell you it’s brutal. Very few places here have air conditioning, and zero places have heat (much less windows that seal). Hell, they won’t even SHUT the windows! They have an expression – “uma pessoa cebola” or “a human onion” – to describe how they dress here during the winter. In the morning you put on about 4 layers but take them off 1 by 1 as the day gets warmer. Then, as night comes, they slowing come back.

Since I last wrote, I’ve mostly stayed in São Paulo. One weekend we took off for a memorable camping trip on a small island right off the coast called Ilha Bela. Marisel showed me her month-old mosquito bites today!!! It was beautiful though and truly secluded. As for my upcoming travels, the rough plan is like this: First, I’m going to Bahia in the northeast of Brazil. It’s the cultural center for Afro-Brazilian culture (roughly 70 million Afro-Brazilians) as well as the oldest European-settled region of the country. Second, Byron’s coming to visit (!!!) and we’ll stay around São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and the southern part of Brazil where I’ve mostly been. Third and finally, I’m planning to head to Argentina to visit the Solitos, my former host family. I’m really looking forward to visiting them as well as quickly exploring some other places in the region around northern Argentina. I had originally planned on going to Buenos Aires, but I think I’m fed up with city at the moment. Then, it’s back to the States on August 8^th to see Ma n Pa!

In other news, as some of you know (most notably my sister), I’m an uncle!!!! Andreu Rhys Villa was born last Wednesday, June 18!!! He’s beautiful and I am way excited to visit him, his sis (almost 2), and his parents when I get back.

My best to all of you and grace, peace, and love be yours in our Lord Christ Jesus!

Wyatt

Bad weather and futebol

Indiana, you win. Your weather is finally better today. Here’s what I was told about the weather when I arrived in January: It was raining all the time so I asked when it would stop. March. After March, it would get colder and be dry as a bone. March came and went raining, but the weather stayed pleasantly warm. Today, May 2, I woke up, and it’s cold, gray, and raining. The two seasons, warm & wet and cold & dry seem to have a child.

50 degrees may seem tame, but you have to understand how winter is without central heating. At least at my parents’ house, the end of fall in Indiana is the coldest time of the year. About 2 weeks every year, it is clearly cold enough to turn on the heater, but we can’t until the filter is changed – so the house stays at 50 degrees and my hands turn blue. No one has heat here (or well-sealed windows for that matter), so I’m looking forward to lots of sweatshirts and layers for the remainder of my stay. Hopefully, it’ll at least be sunny. J

In January, I had to pick a futebol (fu-chee-bôl) team. My choices were the 4 big teams in São Paulo so I went with the flow and picked Corinthians, my family’s team. 2 weeks ago I went to a São Paulo (another of the teams) game: the stadium was about half full, the team won by 1 goal, and the crowd chanted a little bit. So on Wednesday, I was invited to a Corinthian´s game. Same stadium, completely different experience. Every fantasy I had about soccer in Brazil was fulfilled. The stadium was packed, the crowd was wild and electric, and after 1 half, the score was 4-0!

Filing into our seats, the first thing to notice was the strong smell of marijuana. In the U.S., you can´t even smoke tobacco in a stadium. Dotted around the stadium, people lit flares all games so it almost looked like smoke-effects at a concert. In a stadium for 60,000 people, the tickets are numbered, but good luck if you want to try and sit there. At one point, I asked why the seat´s didn´t have backs. I was kind of laughed at – FIFA just made them install seats about a decade ago.

The most amazing thing about the crowd was their ability to chant. There were literally at least 15 different chants that everyone knew. When they want to distract the other team, instead of yelling, everyone whistles at the same time and it sounds like Death is arriving. The crowd claps, chants, whistles, and curses in unison. I heard there´s even a soundtrack.

The root of the craziness comes from the organized fan block, Gaviões da Fiel. Think hard-core student section. Every time we looked over, they were doing something different. Apparently, they´re also the ones who tend to get violent because they were in their own fenced-off section and are all required to register their names. One of the guys I was with tried to enter the normal part of the stadium with a Gaviões da Fiel t-shirt and the cops wouldn´t let him. It´s basically treated like gang-ware.

Byron, if you come, we’re going to see the Timão for-sure (“big team” – their nickname).

For the past month, I´ve been teaching classes at a Catholic parish right down the street from my house. I had way too much time on my hands and had hoped to volunteer so it´s been really good. There are 2 different classes, computers and English, and the great majority of my students are 35 to 70 year-old women. They´re super sweet and call me “professor”.

The computer class has been the most surprising but also the most enjoyable. Their level varies, but for some of the ladies this is the first time they´ve ever used a computer. When I tried to teach Word, I had to take a step back and explain the keyboard. Have you ever stopped to think through in depth the functions of the Shift and Caps Locks keys? Besides that, either “Shift” and “Caps Lock” are in English or the keys have arrows in place of the word. I tell a 60 year-old woman to hit tab and she’s got 10 different keys with arrows to pick from. They’re picking it up though, and every class I have to explain less to hit the left button on the mouse.

English has been a little less surprising – I knew going into it that I have no idea how to teach English. Thankfully, most everyone has a base to start from so we can just work on conversation and pronunciation. It´s really made me look around and realize how much English they have to deal with here. Lots of music and TV are originally in English. Most movies are either dubbed or subtitled with the actors speaking English. Ton´s of new words have been brought into the language from English. Every once in a while, you´ll hear word that´s made its way all the way from French to English to Portuguese.

Well, my best to all! To those in school, happy end of the school year or happy graduation!! And happy spring to all!

Wyatt

Life in my nutshell

I think it’s time I write a good, long, juicy entry for everyone. So I’ll try to ramble for at least a few pages.

The last 2 months of silence have gone well overall on my end. My theory of travelling is that it’s a time of extremes: the good times are better and the bad times are worse. I feel like, without a doubt it’s a character building experience. In the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about 1 Peter 1:6,7. It says, “In this [‘living hope’] you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that you faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Christ Jesus is revealed.” My life in Sao Paulo is far from suffering, but as I said the extremes are more extreme; so I would say that it includes more of an element of suffering than I experience living in the U.S. Equally, while I don’t think that most people’s lives as a whole should be characterized as ‘suffering’, a significant portion of it is. So I think this verse has a lot to say about a common experience for all of us.

My other general reflection on life while traveling is that you learn SO MUCH. Let’s say I were at home: I might run into 5 new facts that I don’t know in a day and thus I’d learn 5 new things. Here, I’m a total moron – I walk around confused all the time so I’m learning new things all the time.

Life with my host family is going well. My host grandma broke her knee, so she’s (hobbling) around a lot more. It’s nice to have someone else around. The dog, Eiku, is weirder and weirder. She’s a big, white Akita that reminds me of Thor (my cat from way back) in canine form. Soon after I arrived, she had some sort of allergic reaction and started losing clumps of hair. The hair-loss stopped, but she still looks like she’s got the mange. One day about 2 weeks ago, she spent all night long whimpering. The next morning, my family took her to the vet who diagnosed her with “psychological pregnancy” – she thought she was pregnant and missed her pups. She was lactating! This morning, she was walking behind me in the apartment and stepped on the back of my sandal. Does anyone remember “flat-tires” from elementary school?

My classes are, for the first time ever, all interesting yet conveniently little work. PUC’s educational theory is way different from Purdue’s and thus the view they teach of many of the same subjects is completely different. The first week, I heard a professor say that the purpose of university study is to learn theory not a vocation. You can learn vocations on the job. Studying at Purdue, a school founded to teach Hoosiers to farm and engineers, I hadn’t heard that before. All this translates into more reading, especially of original authors. At Purdue, we read economics textbooks that talk about Keynes, Adam Smith, and Marx, summarizing their ideas and incorporating more modern theories, etc. A PUC class is much more likely to just use Keynes, Smith or Marx straight up. The extra time has been a chance to read more too. Kyliah sent me a book that got me all fired up about human rights.

Speaking of which, communism and the cold war. I’m coming to believe that this is one subject in which the U.S. does not understand itself. Brazil’s foreign policy has historically been very independent, and thus did not really align with one side or the other. However, the U.S. concept that communism is a dead and bankrupt theory is super naïve and sheltered. For starters, ¼ of the world’s population lives in a communist government. If America was really over worrying about communism, would it still be so taboo to be a communist? Communism is about seeking equality and human dignity. Is it wrong for poor people to get a little bit of income redistribution? Did we oppose communism to protect human rights or our GDP? Since the end of the cold war, income inequality has skyrocketed. Communist parties exist (and hold parliamentary seats) all over the world except for the richest of countries, America. The U.S. is encouraging an ethanol policy that contributes to skyrocketing grain prices around the world. Long from being just a possibility, I saw on the news this morning how rice prices in India have double in the last 12 months. For a family who used to spend 50% of their income on food, that is 100% of their income. I agree that communism is an evil system, but isn’t capitalism too? Is the communist concept of class struggle that far off, and are we not really a repressive, callous elite?

There’s lots of communists at PUC J Also, don’t get me wrong: I’m not getting all down on the U.S; I still like us. I just think we could do some healthy self-examination.

Some random elements of life here:

1. Habib’s. Habib’s is to Arabic food as Taco Bell is to Mexican food. Their mascot is a genie. They started to expand into the U.S. right before 9/11 – unfortunate timing.

2. Recycling. Our house does not have a recycling container. However, once the trash gets to wherever it goes, some guy goes through it, picks out all the recyclable material, and sells it. While I realize that job sucks, this seems much more efficient and effective than America’s idea of separate collection systems for recycling and trash.

3. Pollution. Some days, my boogers are dark when I get home.

4. Softball. I was surprised to see some guys playing catch with a softball in the park the other day. Then I remembered that Sao Paulo has the world’s biggest Japanese population outside of Japan. This also means lots of sushi, by the way.

5. Crossing the street. I’m getting really good at it, even though there is a real chance of death between now and August. This is mostly for the guys at Purdue who make fun of how I cross the street.

6. Political correctness. It’s not that Brazilians are less sensitive than Americans; they just pay more attention to what you are saying than the specific words you use. Hip hop is generally called “black” music.

7. Rap. Most Brazilian rap songs seem to be about love – which makes them seem kind of pitiful. Truly, Brazilians are lovers, not haters. Also, I’m realizing how much Americans are obsessed with violence (that includes suburbia). Even forgetting the current situation, we are really a “war-like people”.

8. Making out. I don’t know if Brazilians generally get more action than Americans, but they certainly do in the subway.

9. Punctuation. In a list in English, you can add that last comma or not (A,B,C[,] and D). You can’t use it in Portuguese. Also, in Portuguese, the comma is OUTSIDE the quotations. “Isn’t that crazy”, he said. Stylistically, long sentences are considered sophisticated whereas we try to use shorter ones; so if you read something translated from Portuguese (or Spanish) you might notice that. It’s not that they just can’t write.

I and two friends recently took a trip about 4 hours outside the city to Campos do Jordao. It’s a little town up in the mountains whose exclusive business is tourism from Sao Paulo. The air was fresh, we hiked, and two of the three nights there we ate fondue. It’s colder up in the mountains so they have these really weird pines everywhere and maple trees lining the streets. The pines are so weird because they only have branches at the very top; it’s like a palm tree that loses its fronds every year, but with pine needles.

CIEE, my exchange program, took us on an outing recently to see Aparecida do Norte. Brazil’s Virgin, Nossa Senhora da Aparecida, is a little, black foot-tall statue of a woman found in a river during the 1700s. It’s displayed in the church we went to. Interestingly, it’s black which is important given that about 50% of Brazil’s population is black, and most all the figures in Catholicism are white. Race is an especially fertile and controversial topic within Brazilian religion. The cathedral is huge, and still hasn’t been completely finished. It’s shaped differently than most cathedrals, with the altar in the middle, and feels a little like a shopping mall because it’s so big and sparsely decorated. However, the architecture is majestic, and it’s really very beautiful. In contrast to most cathedrals which are so old, the one at Aparecida felt organic, like it’s still growing around you.

Beyond those two mini trips, I’ve been staying in Sao Paulo recently. School’s in full swing, and I’ve started teaching some English and computer classes which take up some time. For a while, I had a huge excess of time, so it’s nice to feel more busy again. I should cut this off. To you brave and patient people who read this all, thanks. I hope you’re doing well and would love to hear from you. God bless!

Love,

Wyatt

Carnaval!!!

Oi Pessoal! (Hi Everyone!)

The last few weeks have been pretty eventful. I’ll backtrack for you: Classes started Monday…in name. In what seems to be a long tradition for Brazilian Universities, PUC-SP (my school) started the year with a mass hazing of freshman. “Trote”, as it’s called, is the way freshman (“calouros”) are welcomed by their respective academic departments, mostly with body paint and unevenly shaven heads. I’d of course been warned about trote ahead of time, but getting to school yesterday, it was still a shock.

For a month, our group of exchange students has been taking class on the empty campus. As I walked onto campus yesterday, it was completely different with the palpable energy of a new year and the party that accompanies it. Thankfully, I ran into one of the Brazilian students who has been working with us pretty quickly – if nothing else, it meant I knew somebody. In my supposed classroom, the lights were off and no students or professors were in sight. With nothing else for it, I eventually found myself out in the street with a few other American students to have a beer, enjoy the spectacle, and try to meet some people. Fact: the Econ department has its own drum corp.

When I say that my last few weeks have been eventful, I mostly mean the week before this one. Carnaval – Brazil’s famous annual festival – finally came after all the anticipation. Since arriving in Sao Paulo, about everyone I’ve met has told me their own diverse version of how Carnaval is. The main parades and parties happen in Sao Paulo on Friday and Saturday nights (Feb 1, 2). In reality, the parades are a competition of the city’s Samba Schools, community organizations mostly originated in slums, whose main purpose in life is exactly to organize Carnaval. Joining one of our professors, I and 3 other students joined one of the schools, Mocidade Alegre, for the parade. It was amazing. For weeks beforehand, we’d been memorizing the samba (each school has a song), buying our costumes and going to rehearsals. On the night of the parade, we arrived 6 hours early to get over 3,000 people and their costumes in place. Finally, at 4:30 A.M., we walked out under the lights and sound of the Sambódromo (the stadium used once a year for Carnaval) and danced and sang our lungs out for an hour. Later on, I wound my way home, riding Sao Paulo’s public transportation at 7 A.M. with a gigantic Feijoada (traditional Brazilian pork stew) costume in tow.

That was only Saturday night, and we had an entire week of vacation after that so we headed for the beach. My planning for the week was dismal so, in truth, I just took advantage of some other people’s plans and joined them in a hostel outside of Florianopolis, a coastal city 10 hours south by bus. It was really nice to get out of the city and see some rural Brazil. The beach was beautiful and we spent most of our 3 days there. One of the nights, we headed into one of the small towns nearby to see how they were celebrating Carnaval. I cannot describe how cool those townies were: probably 50% of the guys were cross dressing! I basically spent the night marveling at the hairy men walking around in complete confidence with their skirts and nasty tight tops. Better yet, most of them had their girlfriends, dressed normally, hanging on their arms!!

Thanks to everyone who’s been reading along. God keeps telling me and showing me how faithful he is during this trip. It’s about a ¼ of the way through, and it feels like I’m just getting started. As a note, I turned 21 on Saturday!!!!! Woo!

God Bless and write! Email: wclarke@purdue.edu

Hosts and Sao Paulo

It’s been over two weeks since my last post – I think I see how this blog is going to go J. I found out about a week ago that my host home has internet and 30 minutes ago that they have the equivalent of DirectTV. This place is getting better and better. I watched Seinfeld.

I moved in with my family shortly after my last post. My “mom’s” name is Mônika and her 20-year old son’s name is Guilherme (Gil-yer-me, he goes by Gui). We live on the 13^th floor of an apartment building and have a phenomenal view of the city at night. In the building next door lives Mônika’s mom, Dona Jamila who’s hosting another CIEE student, Julie. Julie eats her meals over at our place so it’s nice to see her all the time. Though the immediate family is small, they are very hospitable so there are almost always people over – they joke that they and their friends are a big family and it’s pretty much true. Haha every Friday, there is a get-together at one of the couple’s homes. I’ve gone for the past 2 weeks, and ended up both times talking to the 69-year-old partially sober man named Marcio whose home it is about American politics. My task this week is to figure out how to explain to him how the Electoral College works – I didn’t manage it last weekend.

Living in the city has been interesting. It sometimes just seems overly loud and busy, but other times that can be invigorating. The bus system is extensive if confusing and the metro is great. Of course, I can’t really compare it to any other system that I’ve used regularly. To give an idea of size, the urban area of Sao Paulo has roughly as many people as New York. One of our professors mentioned that, any time we might think that Sao Paulo doesn’t function very well, we should consider that it runs on roughly 1/10 of NYC’s budget. It’s a miracle how well this city works! The school I’ll be attending is called PUC-SP (pronounced pookie – like the dog) for Pontificia Universidade Catolica de Sao Paulo. Normal classes start after Carnaval (2-6 Feb), and I’ll be taking econ classes mostly. Communism’s pretty big in Brazil, especially in their universities, so I’m looking forward to getting a little bit o’ Marxist theory.

Well, my greetings to everyone! Thanks for reading, and I love to hear from people if you want to email me.

Peace,
Wyatt

Photos on Facebook

I´ve posted some photos on Facebook from my little trip. They´re publicly accessible at: http://purdue.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2314817&l=fbc72&id=13730318

Arrival in Brazil

It’s Sunday, and I’ve been gone for a week today. It feels like it’s been a year. The program I’m participating in, CIEE, started on Friday, so I had a few days to see the sights before it started. My flight was fine, and I arrived in Sao Paulo on New Year’s Eve morning.

That day, I met up there with Kim, a girl in the same program from Milwaukee, and, per instructions from the lovely people at the front desk of our hotel, we found ourselves that night on Avenida Paulista in downtown Sao Paulo. It’s similar to Times Square in that a lot of people meet in the street, there’s music, and you count down from 10 at midnight. For Kim and me, it was some of the best people-watching of our lives. Beginning at the metro station where we got onto the street, we walked well over a mile toward the main stage and stopped another 1/6 mile short of the stage when there were just too many people to keep on. The paper the next day estimated that 2.3 million people at the celebration!

On the afternoon of the first, Kim and I boarded a bus for Rio de Janeiro where we stayed until the program started Friday morning of the 4^th. We met up there with Milton, another student in the program from Texas, and had an even more eventful time than in Sao Paulo. The first morning, we took a guided tour of the largest (and nicest) favela [slum] in the city. Brazil and especially Rio de Janeiro are known for huge slums in their cities controlled by gangs and which the police can’t enter. At 300,000 residents, Rosinhas is the largest favela in Latin America (according to the tour guide). The intent of the tour is to show a more rounded and positive view of the favelas. Obviously, they get a very bad rap which has been widely disseminated by movies such as City of God, a great film about another of the favelas in Rio, Cidade de Deus.

I was actually surprised during the tour by how the favela is similar to any city. My expectation was for it to be smelly, to have trash in the streets, to see lots of people sitting around looking stoned and for all the buildings to be tattered shacks which barely stood up. All to the contrary. Though extremely narrow, all the streets and passages were clean of trash and smelled roughly like the rest of the city. It was lively with shops and songbirds hanging from windows. Though extremely haphazard and patch worked, all the structures were of concrete. Of necessity, since Rosinhas is built into the side of a mountain, most buildings have around 4 floors – all of them seemed to be standing up just fine.

Rather than some great swelling of passion for the poor of Rosinhas, what struck me more is how it’s organized. Let me note, I did not say how well it’s organized. As I mentioned before, the police do not enter Rosinhas, and no one pays taxes there. A few government capital investments have been made but very few. In a city slum of 300,000, we were told there is one public elementary school. Students are bused out if they want to attend high school. All of the residents are squatters so formal property rights do not exist. In short, the government of Brazil does not exist in Rosinhas; it is its own state. The functioning government of the favela is its gang whose revenues come from drugs it sells within the favela. Its functions are to (rigidly) enforce the favela’s borders and law and order. The tour guide informed us that the last time a rape was committed in Rosinhas, 20 years ago, the offender was cut limb from limb, and the pieces were displayed throughout the favela as a warning – she says she feels completely safe.

Clearly, the government is very limited and primitively formed. The formation of the favela is organic, formed by a juncture of the invisible hand and poverty. Very little pre-planning is evident. Each structure and pavement is patched onto the last. The buildings are usually built floor by floor as residents sell the space on their roofs to those moving in. Apart from main streets which are normal width, the streets are anywhere from a few meters to a meter wide, sometimes only allowing 1-way flow of pedestrians. There is no feeling that anything is owned by an external government; the people of Rosinhas own Rosinhas and take pride in it as such. Norms have clearly been established, some similar to a normal city and some completely different. A shop window in Rosinhas is just as you would expect in a poor section of the main city. Basics such as respect for other’s safety and private property thrive. Though the formal legal system may view the whole favela as squatters, a healthy market to buy and rent apartments is evident, with “For Sale” signs posted periodically throughout. In summary of the organization of a place like Rosinhas, it seems that on scale of rigidity some points may include: (1) Communist government (2) U.S. government (3) Large corporation (4) Favela (5) Anarchy.

Of course, I received a very brief (a few hours) and perhaps positively skewed view of Rosinhas. Many of the smaller, newer favelas are more dangerous with less established norms and rival gangs vying for control – they’re more anarchical. Beyond that, my tour group had somewhat of a special “pass” to enter the favela as being led by a resident. Normally, outsiders are not welcome. It was a great experience though and shed a little bit of light on one of the more exotic concepts for me in Brazil.

Beyond the favela, we got to experience lots of the great tourist attractions in Rio. Some highlights were Copacabana beach and the Christ statue and hanging onto the outside of a loaded trolley as it wound its way through one of the neighborhoods. Friday, the 4^th, Milton, Kim, and I were back in Sao Paulo and have been doing orientation for our program since. Yesterday, I met my host Mom who seems great and has lots of experience hosting students. Right now, it’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m happy as a clam sitting in a Starbucks in a shopping mall. A little bit of imperialism can go a long ways! ;) I will make sure to post pictures when I have a chance.