A Word About the Photos

The photos which follow represent an attempt to distill the challenges, successes, emotions and relationships which were part of my AMIGOS Brazil experience. I'm very happy with how they have come out. Unfortunately, not everyone is represented in this collection. I tried to choose twenty of the more interesting photos from the summer, which was not an easy task given that I shot seven rolls over the course of ten weeks. I had to leave some people and places out, if only to be sure that the page didn't take three hours to load! If you have Facebook, you may see more of my photos there before too long. In the mean time, I hope you enjoy what I've put here.

Photos from Serrote

The view from the front door of the volunteers' house.









This lush, sloping goat pasture was hidden away in acres of seven-foot tall scrub.









Neil and Colin on the stoop.












Host sister Fabiana and the family dog.











Host mom Maria Jecina.

Photos from Posse

Brian with Rural Workers' Union organizer Cida (right) and host mom Rosa (center).







Town members with Rosa's recently completed cistern.










Vivek and one of the pedreiros for Posse.











At the volunteers' house.












Watching cistern construction from across the street.

Photos from Boa Vista

It's not hard to see how the town got its name, which literally means, "Good View."







A conversation on the porch of the volunteers' house.






























Maureen painting with a friend. In the background is the casa de farinha.










Jen and Maureen help to load bricks for building latrines.

Photos from Briefing, Midterm and Debriefing

An old fort overlooks the Atlantic Ocean south of Recife.








At the despedida, a crucifix is a reminder of the perennial presence of the Catholic Church.








Project Director Kate and animadora Linda at the final meeting with Cáritas.








Jó and son Jefferson at the despedida.




















Kate and Sara during a break in the action at briefing.

An Update from the Official Blog

For a brief update about all the projects we've undertaken in Brazil this year, see the latest post on the AMIGOS Brazil official blog. It's pretty exciting to see all that written out!

Buying Goats for Serrote

This Saturday, I am hoping to go out to Tacaimbó and buy goats. Five of them, in fact. I’ve never bought goats before. Never had the need to. I always thought they were pretty annoying, especially given that my only personal experience with the animals was when one belonging to our neighbor got through a hole in the fence and spent the better part of a weekend munching on our garden (we were out of town somewhere, so he had a nice, leisurely time of it). In the Brazilian semi-arid region, however, I’ve changed my mind. Goats are ubiquitous here, and with good reason. They are better-suited to the heat and lack of rain than cows, and they require less food and consume a greater variety of fare. Basically, goats are hardy and adaptable creatures, and they thrive in this environment.

One need look no farther than the Northeast’s unique foods to realize just how integral goats have become to life in the region. Way back on my first route visit to Serrote, I sat down to a dinner of sarapatel with my volunteers and their host family. The dish is also proudly advertised on signs outside of Caruaru’s countless storefront restaurants and corner bars. It represents a certain culinary ingenuity, born of the tough climate, and is made from what might otherwise go unused: diced goat heart and liver, cooked in a sauce made from the animal’s blood. Its more involved cousin, buchada, contains the same ingredients, but instead of being simmered in a pot, the stew is tied up inside the goat’s stomach and boiled, much like haggis. The final products of both sarapatel and buchada actually end up being quite similar, however, since in the latter, the bucho — or stomach — is not eaten.

Equally common are the countless offerings of bode: simple goat meat. Around Caruaru, both in restaurants and in private homes, you are much more likely to encounter a healthy portion of fried or roasted goat than beef. It makes for a good meal, especially since it usually comes served with plenty of rice and beans, and often some fresh vegetables.

But the goats of my story will not be going to sarapatel or bode asado any time soon.

One of the places where AMIGOS’ partnerships really shine is in CBIs, or community-based initiatives. Almost all projects have a CBI component, and the ideas which the host towns and volunteers implement are often really innovative. Some of the secondary projects being undertaken in Brazil this summer include constructing a seed bank, making a large gazebo to serve as a community gathering place, building bathrooms — lots of towns are building bathrooms — and, in Serrote da Carreira, starting a rotating fund to help families buy milk goats.

The concept came from some community members who knew about similar programs in the past. The idea is to buy a single goat each for five families in Serrote. The animals will supplement the families’ nutritional needs, and are intended in particular for households with children. Those who receive animals will make a small payment to the local agricultural Cooperative every month for about a year. This money will be pooled into a rotating fund, which, once replenished by the families’ payments, will be used to make loans to new households so that they can also purchase animals. These new participants will then have a similar repayment schedule. The Cooperative has experience with this form of financing, and AMIGOS’ task has mostly been to set up the link between the community’s idea and the Cooperative’s experience. And, since the Cooperative doesn’t have extensive funds, we’re buying the first round of goats.

It is an exciting project, to say the least. As far as I know, helping to set up this kind of funding system is new for AMIGOS, and I am hoping that it will turn out to be a useful model in the future. But beyond the logistics, there is something particularly meaningful about working with goats. They are so fundamentally tied to the Northeast by their place in the region’s food, in its economy, and in its very landscape, that it’s hard not to be engaged by a community-based project which puts these animals at its center.

For right now, I’m waiting. I need to hear back from Jó, to talk to the vols, to talk to our contact in Sítio Jucá. But in spite of the administrative tasks still waiting to be done, things are falling into place. The CBIs are underway in all of my towns, and I’m excited to see how they go over the course of this last week and a half. The project has taken on a certain life of its own, which is sometimes daunting and sometimes nearly awe-inspiring. Lately, I’ve just been trying to keep up, but in this case, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s certainly had plenty of rewards so far. And of course, I’m looking forward to getting to drive out to Sítio Jucá to bring back Serrote’s newest inhabitants, unassuming though they may be.

The Route in Action

These photos all come from AMIGOS Brazil's official blog, which just recently got started.






My route, also known as "Route Bom Dia-tastic"











The Boa Vista vols at home with some friends.














The Serrote vols giving a palestra.

On Route (June 26th-July 7th)

It’s at the table that I often find myself slipping into the best conversations with host families: we talk about the food, about the weather, about the funny things that have happened to the volunteers that week, about the project, and often we joke about nothing in particular. These meals on route, like on survey, have eased my own transition into the unusual role of once-weekly overnight guest, and — I hope — helped the volunteers to feel more at home, too.

I had just arrived in one of my towns, my second week on route, to find the volunteers finishing up lunch with their host mom. They invited me to join them, and so I sat down at the table. I served myself and started munching. Meanwhile, the vols and their mom kept right on going with their previous conversation. I don’t remember what it was that they found so funny, but I remember their mom’s easy laugh and skeptical grin when the vols made some statement or another, and I remember the raucous laughter we all shared once or twice, and how, after the meal was done, the girls pushed their way into the kitchen to wash the dishes despite their mother’s bemused protestations. The best part of it was, they looked like a family.

If the volunteers are making connections with their host families, they are also getting a lot done. All of my towns have started some sort of workshop with the town kids or even just put aside some time to play soccer with them. There are lots of plans for secondary projects, including buying a school computer and integrating it with the curriculum, building latrines, starting a crochet cooperative, and organizing a sort of after-school gym class. They are all interesting projects, and they’re all going to take materials which I’ll need to find here in Caruaru. My big ongoing task over the next couple of weeks will be researching prices of computers and printers, cement and sand, needles and thread, soccer balls and nets. Luckily, I finally feel like I’m starting to know my way around the city, which will be a prerequisite to that search.

With all the things we’ve got on our plates right now, I am very encouraged when I see volunteers jumping into the project. This past Friday, I visited a couple of my communities with Denise and Fernanda — two women who work in ASA’s Recife office — and with Kate. Our first stop was the school in one of my towns, where the volunteers were going to be giving a palestra — or workshop — on trash and recycling. We pulled up in the middle of a game of dodge ball. The two vols towered over their significantly younger companions, tossing the plush ball back and forth. In spite of the size difference, the friendly rapport between the vols and the kids was obvious. The AMIGOS bantered and gently teased the kids, and the kids did the same. For a while, the four of us just stood and watched, smiling and taking photos.

Eventually, the game ended, and we made our way into the school to watch the palestra. They vols wrote the names of different kinds of trash on the board — gum, paper, painted wood, rubber, glass — and then had the kids guess how long it might take for the various types of litter to disintegrate. With each new material, the class room exploded: “Five years!” “Ten years!” “10,000 years!” Some students smiled and laughed. Some were very serious: “I say three years. Definitely, three years,” they’d say, their furrowed brows indicating no-nonsense attitudes. It was great to see both the students and volunteers so engaged.

The palestra only lasted about 20 minutes, and shortly thereafter we left the vols and headed out to visit some families and check in on the cistern work. We traipsed around a lot over the course of the afternoon, mostly visiting cisterns — both completed and still under construction — but I feel quite confident in saying that no one there lost sight of the fact that those “concrete results” we saw would have been impossible without the countless relationships to which the easy playfulness of a bunch of school kids or the banter of a mother and newfound daughter are testaments.

Briefing Photo

Just to keep things interesting: this photo was taken on June 22nd, at the end of Volunteer Briefing. There's a quick update about the vols' first week in Brazil on the AMIGOS website, too.

A Note

It's been a long time since I last posted! Sorry for the irregularity. It’s been busy here, and Internet access hasn’t been so great so far, though I’m hoping it will get a little more regular over the coming weeks. The following two (new) posts are more about the first week I was here, from roughly the 8th to the 11th. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get something written about town survey and volunteer briefing before long, too. However, in the mean time, a quick update about the latter: last week, I was on survey, visiting the towns for which I'll be responsible. They are beautiful places, and the vols who live there will have lots to do. I had some transportation and municipal holiday challenges along the way, but they’re all set now, and the volunteers are safe and sound and getting to know their families. This past week, we had briefing at a retreat site nearby. We got to know the vols, they got to know us. We did a lot of water-related workshops, and we put them together in partnerships. We took them out to their towns on Friday, and I spent the night with one pair before coming back to staff house on Saturday afternoon. Right...now on the older (somewhat belated) stories. More to come soon, I hope!

Cáritas (June 9th)

Each one of the supervisors from AMIGOS is paired up with an animador — an educator-activist from Cáritas, our partner agency. These relationships couldn’t be more central to our project. I am teamed up with Jó, who works in the municipalities of São Caetano and Tacaimbó (where he lives). We had our first meeting together on the Friday I arrived at Staff House. It was mostly a chance for us to ask questions of our animadores, and to get some background on the region.

What I soon discovered, in listening to Jó’s hopes for our collaboration, was that the things I had read and appreciated in Paulo Freire's book Education as the Practice of Liberty were very much alive in Cáritas’ collective mind. If you don’t know who Paulo Freire is, or haven’t read any of his work, I highly recommend it. I have only read the one book, but as soon as I get the chance, I’m going back for more. To do a brief summary, Freire was a Brazilian educator and writer who proposed a teaching philosophy which did not “educate” as much as it allowed the learner to “educate him/herself.” This process of self-discovery, he suggested, was intimately tied to the development of a political consciousness which would signal the beginning of real participation by all members of society, especially the marginalized. This would be the end of the feeling of helplessness which poverty can instill. The poor would see that they could be more than just recipients of the injuries of a violent hierarchy, and that they could play a constructive role in their own world. Freire did not, however, foresee a violent culmination to this process. Rather, he saw the ongoing act of consciousness-building as “loving” and “dialogal,” with the end result of an open, deeply democratic society in like-minded pursuit of what changes might come, not wishing to take ownership of the future, but to let progress come of its own accord. The long and short of it is that I find Paulo Freire’s ideas to be very exciting, so it was a very pleasant surprise when Jó began describing the process of cistern-building which we will be undertaking in Freirian terms of encouraging consciousness-building and participation.

We will be supporting Cáritas in their work with the much larger Programa Um Milhão de Cisternas (1 Million Cistern Program) or P1MC. Our volunteers will be helping with the construction of these tanks during the course of the summer, at the rate of about one or two per week. Right now, we are in the rainy season, which lasts roughly from April through June. During this period, rain water is collected from the roofs of houses and piped into these cisterns for use in the dry months. This is part of an overarching program by a group called Articulação no Semi-Árido Brasileiro (The Brazilian Semiarid Joint Endeavor), or ASA, to build sustainable living practices which are in harmony with the unique environment of the semiarid region.

As Jó and others have pointed out, however, the cisterns are not an end unto themselves, but a means toward consciousness building: an object about which people can say, “If we can do that, what else can we do?” As a small part of this larger process, AMIGOS will also be undertaking other Community-Based Initiatives, or CBIs, which are pretty much whatever the communities and volunteers make of them. In the past, CBIs have included construction projects, murals, mothers groups, and craft cooperatives, among many other things. These projects should provide some great opportunities for our vols and their towns. I have always been excited to see what comes of this summer, but I am even more so now, having gotten a look at the wonderful foundations which our partnerships with Cáritas and ASA form.

Arrival (June 8th-9th)

I took a 1:15 AM flight from São Paulo — at the southern end of the country — to Recife, in the northeast. I had been at the airport all day, struggling to stay awake. When we finally were called to board the plane, at around 12:45, I shuffled down the aisle, shoved my backpack into the overhead bin, and slumped down into my window seat — thank goodness for being able to lean against the wall! — and fell completely asleep.

I woke up as we were starting our descent, around 4:00. My ears hurt. At first I couldn’t tell whether or not we had landed. The clouds seemed to stretch out like the tarmac just below the plane’s wing. Then the flight attendant’s voice came over the intercom, telling us to stow our tray tables and put up our seatbacks.

Inside the terminal, I got my big backpack and my sleeping bag from the carousel and went out to the lobby to read for an hour. At 5:10, I went outside to get a taxi to the bus station. We drove through the nearly deserted streets in half-light. The driver seemed to consider red lights to be more of a suggestion than a mandate to stop, but I didn’t really care. The storefronts gliding by in the blue glow seemed serene. The other cars slipped past us with little sound. I love the early morning, and scenes like this are why.

By the time I found myself on the 6:00 bus to Caruaru, it had become full daylight outside. We shrugged off the last buildings of Recife a few hundred meters onto the highway, and soon we were rumbling through fields of sugar cane and low scrub. The phrase ‘rolling hills’ is probably overused, but really, it is the only way to describe the terrain through which we passed. I remember one place in particular, where a rough wooden picket fence followed an elegantly undulating line leading away from the road, trailing off behind a final perfect dome of vibrantly green grass. Really, this place is gorgeous.

As buildings began to cluster in along the roadsides again, I leaned forward to watch for the Igreja do Rosário: my stop. As we sped into the center of the city, I spied Cinevídeo, the movie store which occupies the first floor of our building. I pushed my way out of the bus, nearly held back by my sleeping bag dragging across the seatbacks, and took a deep breath. Turning back the way I’d come, I walked two blocks down the road, and through a low metal gate, a light wrought-iron door, up a flight of concrete steps onto a narrow second-story patio, to a second metal door which marked the entrance to our apartment. The rest of the staff was there to welcome me in. I took a nap.

We spent the next few days on training: doing paperwork, re-learning AMIGOS’ rules and regulations, practicing our Portuguese, and being simultaneously nervous and ecstatic about our upcoming town survey, when we would go out on our own to visit the communities where we’d have volunteers for the summer, spending a night in each one collecting information about potential host families and food schedules and setting up emergency procedures. We also had some time to poke around Caruaru, do some errands, and send some brief e-mails. Mostly, however, we talked and ate, wondering what we would find when we got to our towns.