Sensory Overload

I think that I will find it a challenge to write coherently about carnaval as it is an accumulation of two weeks of sensory overload -- sight, smells, sounds, touch, and taste. In the meantime here is a compilation of pictures that I took over the last week in Downtown Recife, Recife Antigo, and Olinda. Click to enlarge.

The Necessities of Life

Since the advent of preparations for Carnaval commenced about a month ago, I have started picking up many Necessities of Life. These include such necessities as three fancy and glittery headbands, two fancy and glittery masks, two pairs of glittery frevo umbrella earrings, and one flapper costume. On Monday, I made my most recent Necessities of Life purchase down in the old part of town where pre-Carnaval fun is already in full swing. These two little guys are styrofoam water bottle or beer can holders [with shoulder straps to boot] dressed up in full Bumba meu Boi regalia. The hats are replicas of the state of Pernambuco flags. Okay, I agree. No one really needs Bumba meu Boi styrofoam beer can holders. But how could I resist? Really!

One Country, Many Brazils

... two nations between whom there is no intercourse an no sympathy; who are ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets... the rich and the poor

- Benjamin Disraeli, English Statesman, Author, Prime Minister,
describing 1840s Britain in the novel Sybil.

Every year, the United Nations Development Programme comes out with the Human Development Index (HDI), a list that ranks countries in descending order of quality of life, using factors such as life expectancy at birth, literacy rates, and GDP per capita. An HDI of 1 denotes a maximum level of human development while a score of 0 denotes a complete lack of human development.

According to the most recent ranking, Brazil ranks 63rd out of 177 countries ranked. Not too bad, considering the fact that Brazil is a middle-income country which has the world’s 5th largest land mass, 5th largest population base [180 million] and 14th largest economy. But as always, the problem with statistics is that they can conceal, gloss-over, generalize, and otherwise obscure [sorry P-Bay!] extreme situations. There are in fact many Brazils and many HDIs within the country’s borders and these Brazils can be divided by region – South/Southeast vs. North/Northeast; by colour – European descent vs. African descent; by gender – male vs. female; and by age – working age vs. youth, among other distinctions. When the HDI for subcategories are examined, the results tend to shock.

In terms of regional differences, the south and southeastern states all have higher HDI rankings than the north and northeastern states. While there is no question that Brazil has made tremendous social gains in the past fifty years [e.g.: infant mortality has dropped dramatically, school enrolment is at virtually 100%, and literacy rates are much higher than they were only a few decades ago], overall gains have not succeeded in diminishing the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The following table shows both the recent gains made in Brazil as well as the fact that the inequities continue.

Ranking	State	HDI
		1991	2000
	Brazil	0.696	0.766
1	Distrito Federal (Brasilia)	0.799	0.844
2	Santa Catarina	0.748	0.822
3	São Paulo	0.778	0.820
4	Rio Grande do Sul	0.753	0.814
5	Rio de Janeiro	0.753	0.807
6	Paraná	0.711	0.787
...	...	...	...
18	Pernambuco	0.620	0.705
...	...	...	...
22	Bahia	0.590	0.688
23	Sergipe	0.597	0.682
24	Paraiba	0.0.561	0.661
25	Piaui	0.566	0.656
26	Alagoas	0.548	0.649
27	Maranhão	0.543	0.636

Aside from Brasilia [whose ranking only includes Brasilia proper and not its "satellite" cites where the majority of Brasilia's non-middle and upper classes live], all the top spots are occupied by states in Brazil's more industrialised south and southeast while all the bottom spots are occupied by states in the Northeast. In terms of ethnic differences, the rankings are similar. If Brazilians of European descent and those of African descent were ranked separately, they would occupy the 44th and 105th spots respectively of the global ranking, a difference of 61 positions. In another illustration, per capita income for Brazil's white population in 1980 was 110 percent higher than Brazil's black population per capita income in 2000. To be fair, the HDI ranking for Brazil's black population increased more than it did for Brazil's European population in the last two decades. However, it is clear that the gap is still wide.

One City, Many Recifes

As a metropolitan state capital in Brazil’s Northeast, Recife is not immune to any of these extremes. Back in December, the city launched a city-level Human Development Atlas which divided the city into 62 different neighbourhoods or bairros and calculated the HDI for each. The results put the following neighbourhoods in the following positions:

Neighbourhood	HDI	Global Comparison¹
Boa Viagem / Pina	0.964	Norway
Graças / Aflitos / Derby / Espinheiro	0.953	Luxembourg / Australia
Casa Forte / Parnamirim / Jaquiera / Monteiro	0.933	Japan
...	...	...
Brejos da Guabiraba e de Beberibe	0.668	Honduras
Santo Amaro	0.658	South Africa
Joana Bezerra / São José (Coque)	0.632	Morocco / Gabon

Perversely enough, Boa Viagem and Pina’s score would have probably even been a smidgen higher except for the fact that even these neighbourhoods are not free from the favelas – informal, precarious, low-income settlements – that permeate Brazil.

Although many of the neighbourhoods with the lowest HDI rankings are often in the peripheries or margins of the city, a large number are also right in the centre of it all. Joana Bezerra, Coque and Coelho, the city’s poorest and most violent neighbourhoods back right onto Pina and its neighbour Boa Viagem. What is sad is that the richer neighbourhoods’ reaction to its own proximity to poorer neighbourhoods is not always to try and find solutions to these immense gaps², but rather to put up more barriers, hire more private security guards, keep more store doors locked during business hours, and raise the levels of both physical and psychological fences.

¹ Yes, I realise that I am comparing disaggregated to aggregated data, probably a serious no-no in statistical analysis!
² Fortunately many solution-searchers [and finders and implementers] do also exist, as I hope that my blog ultimately shows.

Chad vs. Brazil

Last summer when I was in Canada, my five year old nephew asked, "Aunty Karen, is it hotter in Chad or in Brazil?" Not really knowing much about Chad except for the fact that it is located in the middle of Africa, I had to answer that in all likelihood, Chad was hotter than Brazil. After surviving this week, I would like to change my answer. Boy is it hot here!

Vignettes

It is not uncommon to see young teen and preteen boys escape from paying bus fare here by either climbing in the windows of moving buses or by hanging off the sides and backs of buses, holding on to whatever they can as the buses madly swerve in and out of traffic. One weekend, as I was heading into town, a young boy latched himself onto the outside of the bus, his hands peeking over the ledge of an open window. Unconstrained by traffic, the bus barrelled down the street at a clip that would make any weekday driver envious. The driver stopped a few times to let people on, thus giving the boy a chance to rest his hands and arms before heading off again. Through all the stops, the back door remained closed as not one passenger left the bus. After the boy had held on to the side of the bus for well over two kilometres, the driver opened the backdoor just long enough for the boy to climb in. Clearly relieved, the boy took a seat on the back steps. Moments later, when I glanced over again, the boy had disappeared. I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had taken a seat at the back of the bus and had promptly fallen asleep.

Last week I had lunch in a bit of a fancy restaurant [read: my meal, including an appetizer and dessert, a drink, a coffee, and tip cost R$60/C$30]. As I was digging into my meal, a couple and their small son walked in, young nanny dressed in a white uniform in tow. The family sat down at a table and the man and the woman examined the menu, ordered the food, and then shooed the son (and consequently the nanny) away. Before too long, a plate of hors d’oeuvres arrived which the man, the woman, and the now returned son enjoyed, the latter courtesy of the nanny’s help. Once the hors d’oeuvres had been polished off, two steaming entrées were brought to the table, from which a portion of one was siphoned off for the son. The nanny sipped a coke while feeding the son. Otherwise she stared straight in front of herself. When the man and woman had finished eating, they ordered and drank a coffee. When the coffees were finished, the foursome got up and left. In all likelihood, assuming their lunches were more or less equivalent to mine, the couple's meal cost 1/3 to 1/5 of the nanny's monthly salary.

One night when I was coming home after an evening out, I got stuck in a mini-traffic jam near my house. Thinking this a strange thing for such an hour, I glanced out of the car window and saw the reason for the hold up: the occupant of a flashy SUV negotiating with a young barely-clad teen on the street corner. Horns honked expressing annoyance at the delay. The SUV turned the corner, the girl ran the few metres and hopped in, and the cars continued on their way.

Over the past year, the Ministry of Communications, in partnership with a variety of other institutional partners, has been installing telecentros - essentially internet centres - in small agricultural communties in the Northeast as part of an effort to increase access to information and communications. Isolated and poor, a majority if these rural communities did not even have access to conventional phone lines when the centros were installed. This week I attended an event during which an evaluation of the centros was being conducted. When asked how the internet could change the life of subsistence and often illiterate rural farmers, a cotton farmer answered. At one point over the past year, the farmer had been dealing with a potential buyer. When the buyer offered the farmer R$2 per bushel, the farmer's son hopped on the internet and found that cotton was currently being sold for for R$4 a bushel. Armed with this information, farmer and buyer subsequently agreed on a sale price of R$3.50.

This afternoon, I met a group of twenty teens who applied to and were accepted to be trained as volunteer peer educators with a local teen health clinic. On Monday, the teens will find out if they "passed" the training and whether they will become part of the core teen education team. If successful, the teens will spend eight hours a week doing extension work in the clinic, in schools, in communities, and with families. All twenty teens were on pins and needles waiting to find out whether or not they would be invited to be a part of the team. These are the faces of tomorrow.

640g – or – The Perils of a Perfected System

One of the greatest challenges of living in Brazil is that the food is really good. I mean, it is really, extraordinarily, superbly good. Although it might seem that I am exaggerating, those who know Brazil can attest to the fact. Even a simple meal of fish, rice, beans and salad on the beach risks being delicious. One of the culinary phenomena that Brazil has mastered is the por quilo or by weight system. A por quilo is a restaurant which lays out a hot and cold buffet and charges patrons by how much the plate weighs. The trick, of course, being to eat, light yet costly food while staying away from the heavy, yet cheap dishes. Even without this logic though, the cost / benefit / taste advantage of these places is clear.

Por quilos in Brazil come in all shapes and sizes and are standard lunchtime fare. Choices can range from ten different dishes in a smaller and more popular por quilo to thirty or forty or even fifty different dishes in fancier por quilos. Cost can vary from R$8-10 [C$4.50 -5.50] a kilo to upwards of R$30 [C$16.50]. Being the main meal of the Brazilian day, my normal lunchtime weight hovers somewhere in the 430g vicinity. After years of weighing my lunch, I’ve come to understand my consumption patterns rather well! However, in the last two weeks, I have gone to two new por quilos which have had tons of tasty looking dishes laid out in front of me, tempting me to dig in and give them a try. So as it turns out, my two lunches at these new places both weighed in at 640g! While that is only 200g more than my usual consumption, one could also look at it as a 50 percent increase! Yikes! I’m thinking that the solution is to go back to these two places on a regular basis so that I do not need to feel the need to try everything when I do go. Of course, this strategy could be a problem should it backfire....

A Feast of Tiles Part II

After posting a montage of tiles from Olinda a few weeks back, Expat Traveller asked how the tiles were used. Always aiming to please, I now present the houses that said tiles adorn. Portuguesa Nova -- although I joked about you upping the ante -- what I am actually thinking is that I need to apply for a grant so that I can study the differences between Portuguese and Brazilian tiles and tile use. Shall we prepare a co-application? It will involve copious free travel to both Portugal and Brazil.

Quick! Lock the Door, the Clients Might Get In

One thing that surprised me upon arrival in Recife is the fact that many/most of the commercial establishments [mostly stores and a few restaurants] in my neighbourhood - aside from those located in self-contained malls - keep their doors locked during business hours. It makes for a strange encounter as the clerk who ends up opening the door will do so in the same way that someone would open their front door when there is an unsolicited knock. Invariably, the clerk will open the door 20-30cm and ask if they can help you. My reaction is always the same: i) are you open? and ii) would it be possible to take a look at your merchandise or order some food [as perhaps I will spend some money here]? At which point, the clerk will open the door all the way and let you in.

The reason this surprises me is that I have not come across anything like this in any other part of Brazil. As far as I can remember, I have not encountered locked doors in any of São Paulo, Rio, Brasilia, or other cities that I have travelled to. Maybe I just haven’t been in the right parts of town. While Recife does have the fame of being Brazil’s most violent city in terms of homicides, I would need to do a bit of research on commercial robbery rates to see whether or not these locked doors are merited or not.

Recently, I have started noticing that a lot of businesses that were around when I arrived last summer are now empty with For Rent signs hanging in the windows. Perhaps a result of discouraging clients from entering, me thinks.

Moonrise Over Boa Viagem

More Pre-Carnaval Fun in Olinda

When they¹ say that Carnaval lasts a month in Northeastern Brazil, they aren't kidding!

¹ Ever wonder who they is/are?

Frevo Fever

This past Thursday [February 9th] was Dia do Frevo or Frevo Day, coined as such since February 9, 1907 was the very first time that the word frevo was written in an official capacity [in the Recifense newspaper Jornal Pequeno]. Frevo is a unique Brazilian music and dance form which originated in Recife as a result of the mixture of capoeira dancers/practioners following Recife's military/marching bands. As space was tight and the marching bands, well, marched, the capoeira moves were slowly altered and frevo was born. The word frevo itself, comes from a slang mutation of the word ferver -- or to boil -- a word frequently used to describe the atmosphere on Recife's streets during Carnaval when the marching bands and capoeira-come-frevo dancers would take over the streets. Other Brazilian, Latin, and even Russian dances have also had their influence on frevo.

In celebration of Dia do Frevo, one of the country's greats, Antônio Nóbrega launched his newest cd Nove de Frevereiro, loosely translated as the Ninth of Frevruary. Although I missed the Thursday night street party launch in Old Recife, which I quite regret having now seen last night's show, I did manage to make it to the first of three concerts last night. It was amazing! First of all, Nóbrega is amazing. He sings, dances, plays the instruments, and is a good story teller. The concert consisted of Nóbrega, a fifteen or so piece band [saxes, trumpets and trombones, strings, and percussion] and a group of about eight dancers who came on and off the stage. I also learned that frevo is not just about the umbrellas, but that different types of frevo exist, including one which is much more waltze-like and less frenetic. I'll try to post an audio clip in the next few days with a frevo tune or two.

Aside from the excellent music, the concert evovled in true Brazilian fashion.

What started out looking like this:

Ended up looking like this:

Yes, those are many many dozens, hundreds even, of people up on the stage dancing away! But wait, it's not over! When the show ended, Nóbrega, the band, and the dancers jumped into the aisles and led everyone into the lobby where the party continued some more. The picture is a little dark, but needed to be posted!

In all, a great way to spend the evening. Fortunately, a friend of mine who teaches frevo has promised me at least one pre-Carnaval lesson, so that I too, will be all set!

Run Nose Run

The ex-termitators came on Tuesday and sprayed their toxic fumes into my house. The technique, which they assured me was harmless even as my eyes watered and my throat closed up [yes, I was wearing a mask], involved first, removing one screw from every electrical or cable outlet and spraying a powder into the wall, and two, drilling five holes [two on each side and one on the crossbeam] of every doorframe and the inside of every closet and cupboard and then injecting a toxic liquid which is then supposed to seep into the wood and kill/discourage termites from settling in and wreaking their havoc.

Well ... the immediate result of the powder being sprayed into the electrical outlets was a large white cloud of toxic vapour seeping out and dissipating into the air, while one can imagine the result of the liquid which was injected into holes drilled vertically up into the beams. Think gravity.... When I pointed out that the liquid sprayed into the vertical holes was simply leaking out onto the floor, the ex-termitators agreed to plug each hole for a few seconds with a cloth that I had to provide. Poor Felix, he had to spend the day locked up in the backroom. In any case, the entire affair took just over two hours and then I was left with the mess of having all my worldly positions strewn around the house while the poison worked its way into the beams and bases.

So, why the runny nose? Well, today I spent several hours starting to put everything back in its place. However, the disruption of so many clothes and other items has led to a major Stirring Of the Mould. I haven't blogged about my mould problems, but this picture, taken a week or two after arriving in Recife [yes, it only took a matter of days for this to happen...] should say it all!

Carnaval is Get Closer....

Although my actual reason for heading to Centro this past weekend was for the specific purpose of finding a bolt of black brushed cotton, I have to say that not only did I not find any, I didn't even look! I got totally sucked in by all the madness swirling around me that I ended up going in every single store except for the fabric stores. One of the fun things about Centro is that each little street has a specialty, so as one wanders around, one passes through the shoe street, the clothing street, the party store street, crafters' boulevard, bead store alley, stationary way, and ... of course ... as the days get closer and closer, all the stores selling glitter and gold for Carnaval!

Let's just say that the Carnaval stores were doing a hopping trade on the weekend and it took all my will to not completely lose my sense of control and purchase the makings of something extravagant! I did however fold when I found this mask.

Really, how could I resist? Masquerade Ball, here I come!

Feeling Crabby

Since the rural jungle thing didn't pan out this weekend, I decided to hit its urban cousin in full force and headed to Centro and the São José market. Centro is a swirling mix of narrow streets, bustling shops and sidewalk stalls [you can forget about walking on the sidewalks there!], thronging masses of civilisation, colonial churches, and the chance to purchase anything that you ever imagined existed and then some. It truly is the Urban Jungle. And well worth the experience! The guy in the picture was selling live crabs, some of which were strung together kind of like a garlic braid, and some of which had their little claws held shut with leaves. Taste differences aside, personally, I think that I would go for the claws-shut variety!

More of the Same

I apologise for writing yet another post on how difficult it sometimes is to get things done in Brazil, but let it be known that today I went to not one, not two, not three, but four different banks/financial institutions to pay bills. Stop One: Bank #1 (my bank) where I paid for two out of four bills (long distance & cell phone) and withdrew enough money for the other payments; Stop Two: The Lottery Kiosk to pay the four bills for our phone lines; Stop Three: Bank #2 where I paid the condo fees; and Stop Four: Bank #3 where I prepaid for a hiking excursion that I will do this weekend. Such an enjoyable way to spend a sunny Friday afternoon!

Ack! I do have bugs

It turns out that my rant about the bugs in my closet may have been closer to the truth than I thought. Today, when I got home from work, I decided to make a quick pasta and sautéd vegetable sauce. I put a pot of water on to boil and started chopping and stir frying the veggies. The veggies were well on their way to perfection when the water reached a roaring boil. I quickly ducked into the pantry and pulled out an unopened bag of pasta [unopened being the key word here]. As soon as I slit open the top and poured the noodles into the water, I noticed strange black blobs floating in the water.

A closer looked confirmed that they were indeed BUGS! Lots and lots of bugs. I then grabbed the bag of pasta for a closer look and found that there were dozens of bugs infested in the bag [the sealed bag that is...]. The bugs had obviously been there for a while as many of the noodles had clear signs of nesting and routing going on -- I was surprised that some of the noodles were even able to retain their distinctive noodle-shape. Wanting to neither eat the pasta, nor let the bugs live on in my garbage can, I decided to throw all the pasta in the pot and boil them to death [it's my new and untested evil side showing through].

A verification of my other bags of pasta revealed similar symptoms. Now pastaless and riceless [there are moths in the rice!] I settled down to quite a tasty dinner of stir fried veggies doused with the President's Peanut Sauce. Thankfully the bugs haven't figured out a way to bore through glass or metal. I heard that carbs are overrated anyways.

Why its Hard to Walk on the Sidewalks of Recife - Reason #3

Sidewalk : Parking Lot; Parking Lot : Sidewalk.

Reason #4
Reason #5