Words

In dealing both with the visitors from LASA and then my parents' visit the following week, I realized how much my friends and I use Portuguese words, even when we're talking in English. Some words, usually nouns, are just easier not to translate, and since everyone knows what they mean anyway, there's really no reason to do so. A rather over-emphasized version would sound something like this: "Yesterday as I was heading to the rodoviária (1), the taxi driver took the shorter route around the lagoa (2), and I got to see some people doing capoeira (3) in a park. We passed a place selling pão de queijo (4) and pão francês (5), but it wasn't busy because it was Saturday and most people were eating feijoada (6) instead." Nobody living in Rio would have any difficulty understanding any of those words, but they go untranslated for at least three different reasons. Bus station (1) and lagoon (2) are such commonly-used words in Rio (there's a big lagoon in the middle of the city) that it's actually the English translations that sound foreign to my ear. Nobody calls them by those names. Cheese bread (4) and French bread (5) need to go by their Portuguese names because the English versions of those foods are entirely different from the Brazilian versions. The final category remains untranslated because there are no easy English translations for these elements of Brazilian culture. (3) is a Brazilian martial art (detailed in the entry on Casa Rosa) and (6) is a typical Brazilian dish made with rice, beans, meat, kale, and an orange. Trying to translate them into English is too complicated in everyday conversation. All of those words, among others, have been incorporated into my English vocabulary, and because of that hardly even seem like Portuguese to me anymore. From time to time one of those words would get thrown in when I was talking to one of my American visitors, and it always took me slightly by surprise when someone would stop me and ask for clarification.

Another thing I noticed was how sometimes I accidentally slip into Portuguese now when speaking English. My friends and I go back and forth between English and Portuguese all the time. It's not at all uncommon for someone to ask something in one language and have the other person reply in the other, or to switch back and forth multiple times within a single conversation. With us it's almost always a combination of some sort. That, however, does not work so well when the person I'm talking to doesn't speak Portuguese. Obviously I have a much easier time separting out Portuguese from English than I do keeping Portuguese and Spanish straight, but sometimes the most insignificant words seem to slip through my filter. "Because" is one of my most common slip-ups, as well as things I say almost without thinking, like "okay." I guess it's kind of cool to think that they've gotten so entrenched in my consciousness that they come out when I'm not even expecting them, but I still find it a little strange.

I also think it's interesting to look at the region-specific vocabulary I've picked up here, words I wouldn't necessarily have expected to learn. One can tell a decent amount about a culture by the words that are emphasized, and I'm sure I've learned a very different set of vocabulary here than I would've learned in, say, Norway. Unfortunately, a lot of the surprising words I've learned here have to do with Rio's crime and violence. In addition to the word for "bandit" that I've mentioned in the past, it doesn't take long in Rio for a person to learn the words for drug trafficking, cocaine, gun, assault, "to rob," thief, shootout, kidnapping, lost bullet (the ones from shootouts that end up killing innocent people), something that translates roughly as "smooth criminal," and the name of the most notorious drug gang. Others have to do with Rio's poverty, like the words for slums, street children, and giving alms. In my Portuguese class we even learned the word for the illegal contraption people set up in poor communities to siphon off electricity from power lines.

Not all the unexpected words I've learned reference such serious things, though. I've also picked up some soccer vocabulary, like the words for goal, ball, and soccer cleat, as well as the names of Rio's soccer teams. Last summer when I was here we even did a whole lesson on soccer terms that have been incorporated into everyday speech. I also have certainly learned my fair share of beach words, like the ones for wave, shore, sand, sunscreen, and ice-cold coconut (a delicious form of beachside refreshment). And to think, if I were in Norway, I'd probably be learning the words for snowshoeing and long underwear instead!

Mental Gymnastics

A couple of weeks ago PUC hosted a big Latin American Studies conference that drew participants from across the Americas and Europe. I volunteered as a monitor for the event, and spent my time answering people's questions. There was no single lingua franca for the event. The organization is American, so the materials were printed in English, and while the Americans were bilingual in Spanish and/or Portuguese (primarily Spanish), native Spanish and Portuguese speakers often did not speak English. There isn't a huge amount of exchange between Brazil and the rest of South America, so even though they're neighbors, many Spanish-speakers do not speak Portuguese and vice versa. When papers were presented, sometimes a poll would be taken of the people in the room to find out which language the most people spoke, in which the panel would then be conducted. It was a wonderful trilingual conglomeration of a wide variety of people.

Even though the conference was hosted in Brazil, Portuguese seemed to be the language spoken by the fewest number of people. That meant that, more often than not, the questions people asked me were in Spanish. It was a great opportunity to get in some practice. While I was in Argentina and Uruguay, I was a little shy about speaking Spanish because I knew I'd make mistakes. Here, though, I didn't care. These visitors were in "my" country (since as a volunteer I was theoretically Brazilian), but they weren't speaking "my" language, so I was more than happy to try to help them in their own language without worrying about how terrible they found my Spanish. It was certainly a case of mental gymnastics: I never knew in what language a question would be asked (occasionally they'd be asked in English, as well). That meant my brain had to constantly be switching among languages, which, as I've mentioned before, is no small feat. Especially in the beginning, most of what came out of my mouth was a mixture of two. Whenever I tried to speak Spanish, I got Portañol, but then sometimes when I was talking to Brazilians, I'd accidentally throw in Spanish. Once I even started answering an English question in English and ended in Portuguese. Though most people could understand the Portañol well enough, by the end I think I managed to answer questions in at least 95% Spanish, about which I was pretty excited.

It was fun being able to acquaint people with PUC, and all of a sudden my imperfect Portuguese started looking not so bad. As I watched the visitors struggle with simple tasks like ordering food, I was reminded of how hard things had been when I first arrived, and how much easier they seem now. I was so caught up in the Portuguese and Spanish of the event that occasionally I almost forgot I spoke English. Once I was in the school store and an American woman was trying to ask the cashier for ibuprofen. She wasn't getting anywhere, but for a little while I just watched, waiting for my turn to check out. Then I remembered, "Oh wait - I speak English!" "I don't think they carry that here...you'd be better off at a drugstore." For the first time, my flawed Portuguese was a valuable and useful skill instead of just a hindrance. It was nice to be the one able to offer help here for once, instead of always being the one to ask for it.

Going to School with Monkeys

I saw monkeys on the way to school the other day. They were playing tag on the power lines just outside the campus, and they were completely adorable. At first I thought they were squirrels, but then I remembered that Brazil doesn’t have squirrels, and upon closer inspection I realized to my delight that they were indeed little monkeys. I’d heard that monkeys lived in the trees that surround campus (PUC abuts one of the two national forests within the city of Rio de Janeiro), but I’d never seen them firsthand. I so wished I’d had my camera with me.

In addition to being squirrel-free, PUC differs from OU’s campus in a variety of other ways. In Oklahoma, there’s seemingly limitless space, and the campus has expanded accordingly. To walk diagonally from the National Weather Center at the far southeastern edge of campus to the Catlett music building at the far northwestern edge would easily take more than an hour and a half. Even in the section of campus where most of the academic buildings are, it’s often hard to go from class to class in the allotted ten minutes. PUC, on the other hand, could probably be crossed in its entirety in under fifteen minutes. Since they’re caught between mountains and Gávea, there’s really no room for them to expand outward, so instead they build up. The majority of classes are held in just two huge buildings, and all of mine are held in just one. Instead of racing across a sprawling campus, I simply go up or down a couple floors.

I like that PUC is so compact. PUC has somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 students, but it feels much more intimate than OU, which has only a few thousand more students. It is not at all uncommon for me to go a day at OU seeing hardly anyone I recognize on campus outside of classes. At PUC, on the other hand, where I know far fewer people, I always seem to be running into people I know. One popular hangout that has emerged is the outside Wi-Fi area. Since I have no internet at home, I spend a great deal of time there, and it seems that others do, as well. There’s almost always one of my friends around. In fact, I ended up making friends with a Brazilian guy simply because we always seemed to be there at the same time. Sometimes a whole group of my friends will gather just to hang out for awhile, killing time between classes, or just pausing for awhile to catch up with people. In that regard, there seems to be a better sense of informal community for me here than at OU.

the wireless area

On the other hand, I miss the overall sense of a college community. Brazilian students typically live at home, so PUC has no dorms and, at least as far as I can tell, no group that organizes campus-wide events to draw students together. There are no school sports teams, and PUC does not have a mascot. I’m not even sure that there are official school colors. I come from a school where football is everything (heck, I even planned to study abroad in the spring so I wouldn’t miss football season), and I miss the sense of community generated when the entire student body comes together under the name of the Sooners. In the United States, being a College Kid is a full-time occupation. For at least the first year, most kids eat, sleep, and breathe the “college experience,” and they develop an immense feeling of pride for their school. They are a Sooner, or a Badger, or whatever their school mascot might be, and that becomes a defining element of their identity throughout their college years, and often far beyond.

In Brazil, on the other hand, it seems that a college affiliation makes up only a very small part of a student’s identity. They come and go on campus, attending classes, perhaps stopping to get a bite to eat or use the internet, but then they leave and go back to the rest of their lives. The “classic college experience” exists in a very different form here. I don’t get the sense that people cultivate a fierce pride in their particular school, or that there is any sort of significant rivalry between schools. In the US I am automatically obligated to “hate” anyone I meet from Oklahoma State or Texas, OU’s two biggest rivals, but I’ve never come across anything like that here, even though there are many universities just within the city of Rio itself. Perhaps the lack of sports teams helps reduce rivalries.

In a way, the city futebol teams step in to fill this role. I’d be willing to bet that for most Carioca college kids, their allegiance to their futebol team is far stronger than their allegiance to their university. Instead of seeing people proudly sporting PUC apparel, there are always students around wearing Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo, or Vasco da Gama jerseys. These teams weave together entirely different webs of loyalty, ones that connect not only students from different universities, but also people from all across the age range and socio-economic spectrum, and in the end they generate just as much support, if not more, as the most popular US university sports teams.

In the same way that college affiliation doesn’t seem to be particularly important here, class years don’t appear to hold as much significance in Brazil, either. Older students play jokes (“trotes”) on freshmen at the beginning of the school year, which consist of everything from painting their faces and clothes, to making them dress up in costumes and beg for money (for beer for the older students) at intersections, to things more sinister. However, after this initial hazing dies down, the lines dividing class years apparently fade as well. In the US there is the unfortunate tendency of upperclassmen and grad students to look disdainfully upon younger students simply because they’re younger, but I’ve never seen that here. My group of friends has included everyone from first-semester freshmen up through grad students, and nobody takes any notice whatsoever.

a trote: first-year med students from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro begging for change on a street in Leblon

some of the food kiosks on the way into PUC - the vendors are so nice - the chocolate croissant seller recognizes me and calls me "dear," the pizza salgado seller calls girls "princess," the coconut water guy sings to himself, and the soda guy wished me a happy stay in his country

along one of the main walkways

the open area under one of the two huge buildings

the open area under the huge building where my classes are held

the hallway

one of my classrooms

Hopes for the Future

“Someday you’re going to go to college. You’ll study law. We’ll put you in a class of informâtica [something I assume is like information technology], and you’re going to learn English, and Spanish, and French…”

That was the gist of a conversation that went on behind me recently while I was on a bus. A father was talking to his young son, who couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. It made me smile (and not just because I was excited that I could actually UNDERSTAND the conversation). In a city plagued by violence and poverty, it was so nice to hear words of hope for a change. They weren’t the words of an overbearing father already piling responsibilities on a son hardly old enough to read. Instead, they were simply the words of a loving father determined to do everything possible to see that his son would succeed in life. The way the words were woven together and the tone of the father’s voice made it almost seem like a fairy tale, except that in this case, the little boy really was going to have the opportunity to live happily ever after.

Like many things in Brazil, educational opportunities vary greatly between the rich and the poor. There is universal access to free education through government-sponsored schools, but unfortunately, those schools generally aren’t very good. Some are so overcrowded that the students have to be divided into three sections – those that attend school in the morning, those that go in the afternoon, and those that go at night. Drop-out rates are too high among poor students, especially since many from the favelas want nothing more than to grow up to be “bandidos” like their role models, and of course they don’t need school for that. Several years ago President Lula created a program called the Bolsa Família (Family Scholarship), which gives money to poor families under the condition that their children remain in school. Attendance rates have risen because of it, but there is still room for improvement. Even those students who make it all the way to graduation are often met with a nasty surprise should they try to apply to colleges. To get into a university in Brazil, applicants must pass that school’s Vestibular, which is somewhat like the ACT or SAT, except that every school has a different one. Just like public primary and secondary schools, public universities are also free, but unlike the lower levels of education, Brazilian public universities are the best of the best. They are, therefore, extremely hard to get into, and most public high schoolers haven’t been sufficiently prepared to be able to pass the Vestibulars of those schools. Private universities are easier to get into, but unless they are lucky enough to receive a scholarship, poor students are unable to afford the high costs of tuition. Education is one of the only ways someone poor in Brazil can improve their conditions, especially since almost all good jobs in Brazil require university degrees, even more so than in the United States. Unfortunately, the way the Brazilian system of education is set up makes good education extremely hard to attain for the poor sector of society.

The rich (including the middle class), on the other hand, have a much better chance. As demonstrated by the father on the bus, they value education highly, and most people who can afford it send their children to private school. Education is definitely a big investment, one that can start as early as kindergarten or pre-school. The usual criticism is that the ones who can afford private universities get into the free public ones, and the ones who can’t afford the private ones are left with those as their only option. This is true. However, to be fair, the students who get into the free public universities have often already been paying private school tuition for more than a decade, which must amount to a very sizable chunk of money. In a way, they’ve been paying for their “free” public university education all along.

In addition to regular private school, many students study foreign languages at private language schools. My twelve-year-old host brother, for example, is already studying French in regular school and English at a language school. Language schools are absolutely everywhere in Rio – it often seems as though I can’t walk five blocks without passing one. English is the most commonly-taught language, but French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Chinese are also often available. I think it’s really cool the way it’s so easy to learn a language here. In the US, there aren’t many options available for people to learn foreign languages in a classroom setting after college.

An Invitation to Thieves

I lost my cell phone in Shopping Leblon the other day; it must have slipped out of my bag at some point. Some kind soul was considerate enough to turn it in at the customer service desk instead of just keeping it (cell phone theft is big in Rio). Luckily, I had “Casa” (Home) listed as one of the numbers in my phonebook, so someone from the mall called my host mother to say that they’d found the phone. I was able to pick it up the following day without a problem. Wonderfully convenient, right? Well, not exactly.

Apparently I should never have had “Casa” listed in my phone at all. I put it in months ago, without thinking twice about it. I never expected to actually call the number, but put it in just to be safe in case my keys got stolen or lost and I found myself locked out of the apartment at some point. Plus, if I were to come across a lost cell phone on the street, the first three numbers I’d look for to help locate the owner would be “Home,” “Mom,” and “Dad,” and if someone were to find me unconscious and bleeding in a street somewhere, I’d definitely want them to call “Home” right away. Not so in Brazil.

My host mother informed me immediately that I should never have put “Casa” in my phonebook. When I apologized and said that it was common practice in the United States, she told me in Brazil people can’t do that because of kidnappers. She said she got scared when she answered the phone and heard someone had found my phone, and that she wouldn’t give out her name, believing the caller to be of malicious intent. It makes me sad to think I live in a place where a good Samaritan can be thus vilified automatically, simply because people here live with the fear of being robbed (or kidnapped, in this case) constantly in the back of their minds. It was easier for my host mother to imagine a kidnapper on the other end of the line rather than just a person trying to do a good deed.

The host mother of a friend of mine went through a similar sort of panic. My friend got robbed, and within her lost belongings was something with her home address on it. When her host mother found out, she became extremely afraid that the thief would then come and rob their apartment. As far as I know, that never actually happened, but the threat was definitely very real in the mind of her host mother.

As you can see, in Rio one cannot carry any sort of information that is tied to a home or family. An American driver’s license, the most basic of ID cards that almost everyone over sixteen carries, lists the person’s home address prominently on the card. Nobody bats an eye. If anything, for us it is a measure of security, the assurance that if something goes wrong, loved ones can be easily located. In Brazil, it is an invitation to thieves, a careless way of making one’s family, the most cherished of institutions, vulnerable to danger. Everyone in Brazil is required by law to carry identification at all times, but the nationally-issued Brazilian ID card omits this piece of information.