Brasil

//

So Brazil was the last stop. It wasn’t a particularly good one. A lot of things went wrong for many people. First there were tons of muggings, in the first day in Salvador in particular, and that scared tons of people away from doing anything (myself included). The other thing was that roughly 25% of the kids on the ship went to the Amazon on a riverboat tour, and I would estimate that roughly 85% of them ended up with a seriously rough viral stomach illness that lasted between about 36 and 72 hours in each person. Well anyway. Let me talk about Brazil a little bit.

I don’t know a whole ton about Brazil. Most of what I learned, I would say, came from listening to Dr. Hinchman talk about it one day in Global Studies. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the world and he’s pretty pumped to talk about just about everything, and it’s been really a treat to have him on board and listen to his speeches about politics and history everywhere we go.

Anyway, Brazil takes up 50% of South America and contains 50% of its population. They speak Portuguese. The Pope drew a line once and said that Portugal would get what was to the east of the line and Spain to the west. The Pope was Spanish and meant to give everything in South American to Portugal, but he put it too far west, and so Portugal used the eastern horn of South American – the most easily reachable and controllable part of the continent – as a stronghold to control the rest from.

Brazil had a lot of slaves. Like, a lot. A huge proportion of the population’s genes and culture come from Africa. The state that we visited, Sao Paulo, had 83% African descent.

The distribution of wealth is pretty insane. About as high as South Africa, actually. I forget what percent it is, but just assume that it’s X%. Anyway, the top X% of the population make 85x more than the bottom X%. For comparison, the top X% in America make only 16x more than the bottom X%. So it’s roughly five times as bad as America is, as far as distribution of wealth is concerned.

The politics are a bit worse than in America. They have open-list proportional representation, which started off with good intentions, but lead to career politicians. People switch parties ALL the time. Like remember how we made a stink when Arlen Specter switched from Republican to Democrat? That happens a few hundred times a year in Brazil. More than once a day. You can’t even keep track. It’s like the whole entire Congress switches sides in the course of a year. Anyway, the problem is that when people are looking out for themselves, they stop caring about the party and the party platform. And so even when you have a cohesive platform and a charismatic leader who should theoretically unite the party, nothing gets done because everyone is running from side to side chasing money and power.

However, they did have one president who was really good. I think he’s still in power actually. Corbola, maybe? They used to have hyperinflation but he figured out a way to rework the currency and banking systems and is now keeping it down to 10%. Which is still kind of bad, but not as bad as the 10000% that it used to be.

Crime is a huge issue. In Salvador alone – the city we stopped in – there are 2100 murders per year. Of those murders, 1500 are carried out by police who shoot and kill civilians. Theft and mugging and street violence is also a huge issue.

People are pretty openly sexual just about everywhere. People hold hands and make out and lay on each other in public. Clothing is extremely skimpy. Not just as the beach, everywhere. Boobs and stomachs are hanging out for everyone to see at any time. Not that it’s bad, just that Americans aren’t used to seeing people even more liberal with fashion than they are. Although, I didn’t go to Europe, which I suppose is also an exception.

Back when OPEC imposed the oil embargo, Brazil and its politicians made a conscious decision to try to break the country from dependence on oil and instead started investing heavily in sugarcane ethanol. It’s worked. I think like 25% of the fuel from their cars is ethanol, and they’re way less dependent on it than most any other country in the world. Furthermore, they have an enormous hydroelectric power system which is actually the bulk provider of energy through the entire country. I think they even have enough to share with other nearby countries. That’s not to say that 100% of the power is taken care of by the dams, but it’s something like 50%, and so they give some to other countries as well.

Carnival is a huge deal. Like an enormous deal, and a lot of people spend almost the entire year preparing for it. They view it as a time to sort of wash away the old year and start total anew on a new year. But it’s not like New Year’s in the US. It’s like, after Carnival, sometimes the country will wake up to find that the king had become a streetsweeper and the streetsweeper became the king. You also get sexual license to do just about anything you want for a day – a total free pass – but it only lasts for a day, then that goes back to normal.

Football is also a pretty huge deal. People get really excited about it.

So yeah, Brazil is like that.

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Now I’m going to talk about some of the awful things that happened while we were there! I won’t tell names to protect people’s anonymity. I’ll make up fake names to help you keep track though.

Story #1

Two kids, John and Nick, got off the ship sometime right after they were allowed to and just went for a walk. Just so you know, the port is in the “lower city,” which doesn’t have a whole lot to do. So you have to walk to this huge six-story elevator run by the government and just take that to the “upper city” before there are places you can find stuff to do, really. The only thing in the lower city is one bargain market, which everyone is pretty tired of by now.

Well anyway, so after you go up the elevator, you can (of course) turn left, right, or straight. It turns out that the only safe way to turn is left (it leads you to the historic district, which is pretty safe, at least during the day), and the other two directions really aren’t so hot at all. Anyway, they turned right, which takes you to a neighborhood called Barra, and every tour book on the planet says DO NOT GO TO BARRA, IT’S TOO DANGEROUS. I don’t think they knew that, or at the very least, didn’t know that they were going to the place referred to as Barra.

Well anyway, so they stayed along the coast and they found this one really nice view and were leaning over a railing, and John pulled out his camera and took a picture. There was a 25-year-old (or so) black guy coming up the stairs from the neighborhood beyond the railing as he did that. He then put it back in his pocket, and was just looking at the view for a bit. Before he knew it, the guy had come up from behind him and had him in like a bearhug from behind. People were used to sexual harassment more than anything else from prior ports, and so that’s what John thought was happening. Eventually he broke free of the guy and sort of considered the matter closed, expecting him to just walk away. But then the guy put his hand in his shirt and tried to make it look like he had a gun, and John was just like, What the hell? Of course it was pretty much clear that he didn’t really have a gun, but people don’t really take chances in situations like that. After a few seconds the guy just kind of charged at John again. He put his arms around him and was facing the same direction as him, and tried to throw him down the stairs. John was able to stop himself from going down the stairs, but the man did go down the stairs. Unfortunately so did the camera in John’s pocket, which the man reached up and took, and then ran off into the neighborhood/favela.

Story #2

So in that elevator, there’s a guard. They’re from the government and they’re supposed to keep you safe. Anyway, one of the warnings that we received was that you should never go to the elevator alone, and you should NEVER go at night, not even as a group – just take a cab. Anyway, one kid went alone during the day, maybe like three o’clock in the afternoon or something like that, and a guy forced himself on him and took his camera from him. I really wasn’t sure on the details of this story – I heard this one from someone other than the source – but it seemed pretty crazy. I mean, there’s a guard literally within a six foot radius of you. He should have just been able to ask for help.

Story #3

Two guys and two girls were walking around Salvador, I think in the historic section. It was two couples, actually. They didn’t feel like taking the elevator, so they decided to take the road up to the upper city. They didn’t know it at the time – not until after it happened – but the “long sloping road to the upper city” is another one of the places where tour books will capitalize the phrase DO NOT GO HERE, IT’S TOO DANGEROUS. It’s not controlled by police at all. Even if it were, it’s just one long straight road, and they would zoom right by anything that happened. It’s unpatrollable. And it’s rife with crime, especially when tourists come and don’t put together that there’s no way police could possibly keep them safe.

Well anyway, the crew was walking up there. One of the guys was from New York City and so he usually has his guard up for obvious crime, but his radar kind of goes down for crazies. In either case, as they were walking, a guy slammed a beer bottle against a wall in front of them. In New York, you would just keep walking. But then this guy came after them. Specifically he came toward a girl named Casey, who had an expensive Canon DSLR slung around her shoulder. He was pointing the jaded edge of the bottle at her and apparently making a groaning noise as he did it. Her boyfriend, Wade, who was right beside her, happened to be holding a metallic water bottle that was full, so it was pretty heavy and pretty blunt. He swung right at the guy’s head, and while he missed, the guy realized that it wasn’t worth the fight, and jumped and ran away.

She didn’t carry her DSLR around after that. No one did.

Story #3

There were six kids going around in Salvador in, I believe, the historic district, which is supposed to be pretty safe. These kids were some friends of mine, actually, and one is even my next door neighbor. Her name is Lindsey. Anyway, they were walking in a line on a sidewalk and suddenly two young guys just jumped them. One went right for Lindsey and starting grabbing for her purse, but she pushed it into her stomach and then leaned over to make it really hard for him to get it from her. The other one tried to go for someone else, I believe. As that was happening, the guys in the group (3 guys, 3 girls) starting just attacking the guys. Pushing them away, screaming at them, punching them. I think they told me that they landed a couple punches. After a while, the guys gave up the fight, let go of the purse, and just ran away.

Story #4

Three kids – one guy and one girl – were taking a taxi to a club at night or something like that. It should have probably been like a R50 fare or something like that, but they realized that it was going WAY higher than it should have been. They pieced together that it appeared the taxi driver was just doing circles to drive up the price. They started to get angry with him, gave him a portion of the fare that was on the meter, and demanded to get a new driver. The first driver talked to the second driver that they got, and it was in Portuguese so they don’t know what he said.

Anyway, they got into the cab, expecting to go out to the gathering place they had decided on before. And then, suddenly, they realized they were at the police station, and the police were there to greet them. I don’t think they spoke English at all, and the cab driver was clearly not on their side. They started to get sort of aggressive with the kids, and at one point one of the girls raised her hand to try to protect herself from a cop who was coming forward toward her, and they jumped on that. They started hitting. One of the girls had bruises all over her arms from the cops. The guy who was with them grabbed the girl and shoved her into a corner to try to protect her with his body, and they were reaching around him to try to get to her.

I actually don’t know how they got out of this one – I didn’t hear this from the source, either – but I know they did eventually get back to the ship “safely” and that they filed a charge against the police.

Story #5

There was a bank at the top of the elevator that had an ATM, and a lot of people went to it to get money for the days they had in Brazil.

Oops.

Every single person from the ship who used that bank – every single one – had some amount of money taken from their account. I believe that in almost all cases the accounts were cleared. For most people this wasn’t a huge deal. Usually it was kids, and usually they were using accounts made specifically for the trip, and they were almost empty anyway because this was the last port. But one of the professors used a card linked to a pretty big account, and I think the amount I heard that he lost was somewhere in the neighborhood of $12,000.

So now you know what happens when you use a Brazilian ATM.

//

GRAFFITI IS LEGAL IN BRAZIL. I wanted to point that out. You’re allowed to do it wherever you want as long as the person who owns the place doesn’t ask you specifically not to do it there. Government property is all fair game. The stuff is EVERYWHERE and it’s all amazing, too. Ask for pictures sometime. I think there might also be some stipulation about decency or profanity – most of the stuff seemed pretty decent/tame – but I’m not sure on that one.

I Give Up

I can’t even be arsed to recall the major events of Brazil anymore. I think it went something like this.

On day one, I walked around the city with Scott and then went to Arte Consciente.

On day two, I went to the beach with Xiao, Leah, Qi, Emerson, Crystal and her friends.

On day three I found a guitar pick.

On day four I went and got all my souvenirs.

On day five I went to a public park and my friends didn’t pay at the restaurant.

I’m only really interested in the small things anymore. Some of them I’ll post, some of them are private.

Give Me Some Money

When Scott and I were sitting on a bench in a public park, some guy sitting beside us started saying “Hey. Hey.” I forget if we turned or not. Then he said, “Give me some money!”

We pretended not to understand and quietly talked to ourselves about it and tried to make sure they couldn’t tell we spoke English or were American. The guy and his friends continued talking about us and sometimes tried to talk to us more, but we never responded no matter what they did. We were pretty impressed with their persistence. But we were also in total disbelief that anyone would ever say that to anyone. Would you ever dream of walking up to a stranger in America and just saying to them in French, “Hey, gimme some money!”

Eliana and Henry

At Arte Consciente, they had percussion after a while. It was very loud, and it wasn’t terribly impressive, but it was good enough and I guess it was good to dance to. Everyone but a select few (myself included) started to dance. I remember Eliana was one of the ones getting most into it. Every time they changed the cadence she screamed a bit. One time they changed the cadence and she just unleashed a scream for I swear at least fifteen straight seconds, high and at the top of her lungs.

In all honesty, I think she sings opera in her normal life back at home. This wasn’t operatic, but it was seriously powerfully loud.

I remember one of the people who didn’t join in the dancing was Henry, the ship’s professional videographer. I wondered if he wished he could join in. He was sweating pretty intensely as it was, but he seems like a fairly lively guy in general, and I think he probably would have been interested. I felt a little bad for him. I talked to him later about whether or not he ever felt like his job made it impossible to be in the moment, and he said yeah, totally, all the time, living through the lens really isn’t living. But it’s his job, he said.

I went to a restaurant that night for Jenn’s birthday, only because she asked me to go. I ended up going somewhere else with Aleeza and Gabe and some other people, like Phi and Courtney, who we found there. When we were done we tried to walk back to find Jenn, but a guy on the street corner started gesturing at us, and some guys crossed the street towards us. We decided to call it a night and took a cab ride home. The fare was higher than we hoped.

I am so Violent!

We were at Playa del Forte, I think. We were laying on the sand, I had my shirt off, I think it was before I went in the water. Xiao was sitting up beside me. She had taken some pictures of my face, including one that made her and Moning giggle because it was “sexy” and me embarrassed because I didn’t think it was a good picture of me at all. It was sunny, the beach was short, the water was blue. She was wearing purple shorts and purple sunglasses, sometimes on top of her head. She saw a bug crawling somewhere near me and told me to watch out, so I got up and looked for it while I brushed the sand off of me. She followed it with her eyes. I saw it. It was a tiny, tiny ant, definitely harmless, now crawling through the sand in the hole between my elbow and my body. She started to smack her hand softly onto the ground right on top of the ant. It lived, because sand it soft and it moves, and her hand would basically just waft it away. Every time she came down on top of it she’d say, “I’m so violent!” *smack* “I’m so violent!” *smack* “I’m so violent!” She was smiling and laughing very quietly to herself.

Assassins and Bodyguards

I watched a movie with Xiao in my room that night. I really wanted to watch a Chinese movie, because I just really wanted to see what their movies were like, and I figured she’d have some on her harddrive. She did have a couple, but at first she thought she had seen them all. She said that she had some American movies. She also mentioned that she had some “bad movies” that Max gave her because she was “old enough.” That seemed very strange to me. In either case, we found a couple more movies and decided to watch one called Assassins and Bodyguards.

We put the computer on the chair from the desk in my room and faced it towards us and turned the lights out. It wasn’t late, maybe 9:30 or so. We sat on my bed against the wall, and the torque from my body kept pushing the bed frame away from the wall, and it got worse as I fell further into the gap between the two, and I kept having to fix it. Xiao giggled at me.

There was a girl in the movie who is apparently very famous but controversial in China. She’s very attractive but she dresses like a boy in her private life and doesn’t have a boyfriend or a husband. People think she may be a lesbian, which is rare in public life in China, unless you live in Shanghai and don’t have any presence outside of that city. She’s never said if she’s a lesbian or not.

Xiao told me about when her friend told her that she liked girls, and that more specifically she liked Xiao. She was really uncomfortable with it and told her friend “I hope you’re joking!” They didn’t talk for a couple months. It made me sad, but the conversation moved on somehow after that. I talked to her about it the next day. I don’t know if I changed her mind or not but she’s a nice person anyway so it doesn’t really matter. She asked me if any boys ever loved me and I told her about the one at Brown who had a crush on me, and that I just said I didn’t like boys and hoped we could still be friends.

Guitar Picks

Some of the girls from Asia were going shopping the third day. I took the elevator with them. I had talked to the man at the dock earlier about where to buy guitar picks, and he told me to try a store called Prima Vera right up on the square near the elevator.

One of them stopped to take a picture with a street performer provided by the city. Right after we turned the corner, I saw the store. I told them that was all I wanted to find, and that I was going to go back afterward, and they didn’t need to stay with me. I went in and I showed the people there the picks from Nick in my wallet because I didn’t know how to say it in Portuguese, and they showed me their selection. They were overpriced, but they were pretty. Whatever.

I walked back afterward.

I didn’t have anything on me. No camera, hardly any money in my wallet. I can’t even remember if I brought anything other than the money I needed and my ID card. I don’t think I did. The stories of all the muggings scared me a good bit and I didn’t feel like taking any chances if I didn’t have too.

I remember the German professor telling me at dinner to walk around with a plastic shopping bag instead of a backpack so you’ll look more like a local and less like a tourist. That made sense, though I never had to do it myself. I did tell friends though.

There’s a Japanese population in Brazil and so people know some basic Japanese, kinda like the way that Americans know how to say shalom. A lot of people who saw Xiao and Tien and the others would say konichiwa to them, thinking they must be Japanese people who lived there. That probably made the Chinese ones pretty upset. I thought it was interesting.

Happimess Again

I was playing piano and Brooke walked by and I used her computer to get stuff off of my harddrive and onto my comp or something so that I could start editing the video. She saved my life.

I started editing the video after lunch I think. I had a lot more fun editing it than I thought I would. I thought I would be mad at Dani about it, but I actually didn’t really care. She had come to me at 4am the first morning in Brazil and given me her harddrive saying, “I didn’t get to start the video. Throw the stuff together and I’ll make it pretty when I get back. I’m going to the Amazon. I’m really late, I gotta go.” I didn’t really know what she wanted me to do, so I figured I’d just do it.

I guess I’ll just part of the video so you can see it. Hopefully it’s below.

Yim, Xiaoxia and Spencer

Xiaoxia was spending the night on the ship because she was very tired, and I was too because I realized that I just really hate going out. I ate a second dinner with her in the cafeteria because she woke up late from a nap, and then later I met her upstairs at the bar. I forget if I ate something or not, but I know that I definitely at least got a snack of M&Ms at some point and gave Spencer about half of them. I gave Xiaoxia some too; she said they were too sweet. I told her that she could make wishes on the blue ones and the green ones were magic. She said she didn’t believe me, and I told her to try it. She made a wish on a blue one and turned away when she ate it. I took all the green ones and when she turned back I said, “They’re gone! It’s magic!” She said, “You took them! I’m not a kid!” She said it in the way that only she could. You have to hear her voice or you’d never understand. Sometimes it gets very low, like a saxophone, in a good way, and kind of sultry, which is surprising because she weighs 95 pounds.

I showed Spencer how to get to the public folder and how to get to the stalkerboard. He had never done it on his laptop before. I forget who he stalkerboarded.

Yim works behind the bar. She looks young but I never talked to her before really. She’s 25 and from Thailand. Her contract was finished when we showed up in Fort Lauderdale and she got to spend the whole summer at home there. She came on the ship first as an internship with her college ‘cuz she was a hotel and tourism major (something close to that). I asked her if she liked working on the ship, and she said yeah, it was fine, and if she didn’t like it she’d just leave at the end of her contract, but she was hoping to come back (and probably would). She said that the crew lives on the 1^st floor and that they’re almost always underwater on cruise ships. That surprised me a little. She said that they hang out a lot and that sometimes she wishes for more privacy, but if your roommates have different shifts than you then you can usually figure out a time to be alone if you need it. She said that they weren’t allowed to do anything other than work behind the desk, and they’d be in huge trouble if they brought a magazine or anything with them and an officer walked by and saw it.

There were two Indian guys behind the bar that came eventually. They seemed kind of familiar with me even though I didn’t know them too well, although I’d seen them around all the time of course. When I was asking Yim about privacy they were there. I told her that I liked the ship and the people on it but after a while, I really just want a place where I can scream at the top of my lungs and make noise and not have anyone care about it. One of them, the taller & thinner one, said he could tell. He said he was starting to see me with my guitar all over the ship, alone, fifth deck sixth deck seventh deck. I thought that was really interesting, that he took note of it.

It was a really nice conversation and I wished I had talked to more of the crew earlier. I didn’t really talk to her again until we got off the ship, and I felt bad about it. I saw her at the dock – the crew got off last – getting ready to go home to Thailand. She was wearing jeans and a pink polo shirt and looked like anyone else walking around. I wished I’d taken another night to hang out with them.

Souvenirs

The next day was the only day I ever made a point of going souvenir shopping. Xiao came with me. There was urine on the sidewalk when we walked to the lower city’s market and she was very put off by it. I told her I saw people peeing on the streets in Shanghai and she said, “But not like this!” It was just a little kid, but anyway. This was the time I talked to her about how hard it is for a gay person to say that they’re gay to you, and asked her if she thought being gay was a choice. All on the way to the market.

She walked upstairs at the market. A guy there spoke English because he was a tour guide. That was helpful. She got some charms for people back home – specifically her mom, whom she is very close to – but worried that perhaps she had overpaid. I told her not to worry about it. No price that she paid was seriously exorbitant as long as what we bought was the stone they said it was. This is where I got stuff for Mom and Dad and Jess & Sam. Gem stones are very cheap in Brazil. The woman at the store where I got most of my stuff spoke English and was very nice. She gave me her card to give to other people. The woman at security was impressed by the look and price of some of the stuff I brought back, so I gave her a card.

I learned that she was from Nepal sometime in the last stretch. They speak Malayalam. I started to say Namaste to her. MSWord capitalizes that word by default for some reason.

I kind of wish that I remember what I did with my last night in Brazil, but I’m pretty sure it was spent on the boat doing something. I can’t quite remember what. Maybe someday it will come back to me. Maybe I played guitar, I forget.

I remember the first night, Isaac and Christina and I sat on the steps and talked for a long time. Bernie walked by without a shirt on a played my guitar for a bit. Alex fell down the stairs and we all had a good laugh at that. The Nepali security guard asked us to be quiet so that no one complained about us.

The Bus Ride

We took a public bus on the last day from the terminal to a public park, with lots of help from the tour guides and people who spoke English. When we were going, I was sitting in the window seat, next to Xiaoxia. I looked out the window at one bus stop as we were driving away. There were two really cute girls about my age looking at me, and they realized that I had caught their glance. They laughed and then waved at me, and I waved back.

It’s times like that you wish that you were travelling alone and could just go back to find them.

You also wish that you weren’t in a crime-ridden city, and that you spoke Portuguese, and that attractiveness implies interestingness.

The Park

We thought that the sign said 2.5km because there were only 2.5km left, but then we saw one that said 4km. It turns out there were 11km left. We turned back. That was 8km.

Xiaoxia and I walked faster. Emerson made jokes about Japanese porn and other strange things. I talked to Xiaoxia a lot but I can’t remember what about all the time, except that we taught her some slang. Some phrases included bomb diggity, fo shizzle my nizzle, and word. She went down to the lake in the middle to take some pictures and got wet in the process. I made her stand guard for me because I had to go to the bathroom.

The two of us made it back to the center of life in the park before the other two, so we sat down on the grass. A girl about my age came up to us. I think Xiaoxia (who always tries to learn the local language) tried to say some things in Portuguese, but the girl asked, “So where are you guys from?” in a perfect American accent, so I explained, and then commented, “You sound just like an American.” She spent a year in Ohio apparently, which pretty much explained that. We told her that we were going around the world on a ship. She was going running with her mom. She was light skinned and thin with brownish/blonde hair and pretty cute. She left quickly. I think she told us what she was studying but I forget what it was. I wish she could have talked to us longer, but it’s okay.

Restaurant at the Park

The service was extremely slow. It took us forever to get our drinks, and they tried to give us the wrong drinks too, except for me since I didn’t get one. I only wanted French fries and even that took forever. Leah’s food had a bug or two on it, but she ate a couple bites anyway. I don’t think they even remembered to give Xiaoxia her food, but I could be wrong. At first they gave Emerson an old bowl of rice from another table. He realized it was old right away and freak out, and they gave him a new one. My fries came eventually.

I paid my full R10. Then I left because I knew the others would probably pitch a fight and it’d go poorly. They caught up with me. Eventually the park police caught up with us too, as did the owner of the restaurant. She was pointing her finger and glaring at me, implying that I did something wrong, which was silly because I was the only one that paid full price or anything even close. All the others only paid R2, even though the whole bill was R55. I don’t know how the hell they expected to get away with that. Leah spoke to them in Spanish, which is basically Portuguese, but they pretended not to understand. They ended up just paying the rest. I paid nothing because I already paid in full.

One of the officers kept trying to get us to go under the park bridge just for shade, but no one ever did. I asked some passersby if they spoke English and none of them wanted to help. I think they thought we were in trouble for something much more serious than not paying for food that had bugs on it.

We took the bus back. I sat near Xiaoxia again. They went shopping when we got back to the terminal, and I went back to the ship, and got on for the last time.

Est

I'm in the same time zone as you now! Whoa!

Peace out.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

What I Want to Remember

//

 

Laying down, Xiao sitting up beside me, her purple sunglasses, an ant crawling on the ground beside my body, her telling me there was a bug, rolling away, seeing how tiny and harmless it was, her chasing it with her hand, smacking the sand softly and repeating, "I am so violent!  *smack*  I am so violent!  *smack*."

 

//

 

The seventh deck at nine o'clock, a party where I was the only student, Jenny hugging Rob before he had to leave forever at 4:50AM, getting closer to them as they did so and hearing him recall the nights, when Jenny would hear him trying to control his son, "Sam!  ....   Sam!   ...  Sam!  ..."

 

Peace out.

Nautalis

//

 

Semester at Seacret.

 

I kinda wish I had thought of that in January.  Eh.

 

Peace out.

Ghana!

//

 

Yeah, sorry that I didn’t update for a while.  Been busy and stuff.  Just played a lot of guitar and typing feels really funny when the calluses on your fingertips are aggravated, fun fact.  I actually kind of like it better though.  Anyway, this group of posts will be the same as the last ones.

 

//

 

I don’t really even know where to start with Ghana.

 

People sell things on the roads all the time.  It’s pretty crazy.  Just during traffic jams and whatnot.  Traffic is really really bad pretty much all over Ghana for a number of reasons.  One, a lot of the roads are really bad and so it’s slow-going no matter what.  Two, the cities are getting more and more populated and the government can’t keep up with construction of roads.  Three, the roads that have already been built are too small to handle the traffic.  Four, as people get more money, they’re buying less cycles and more cars.  So anyway, like I said, this combines for really awful traffic, and wherever you go, there are people walking up and down the roads trying to sell things to people in cars.  Examples include food, superglue, and flip-flops.

 

These people are taken very seriously, the road-side salespeople.  My cab driver one time stopped and got some food from one of them.  Our tour bus driver even stopped to get some food from one of them.  Once a kid on a tour bus looked at a guy selling some crazy-looking flip-flops and pointed at them excitedly.  The guy hopped right on the bus and came to the kid’s seat, trying to sell to him.  He didn’t want any, he just thought they looked cool.  That guy was pissed when he got off.  But that’s how roadside sales go in Ghana.

 

I never went to a market because I hate them, but apparently the people there are incredibly pushy.  If you walk in and look at their stuff and don’t buy anything, they try to block you on your way out and grab your wrist and try to pull you back in and guilt you for not buying anything for a long, long time.  Often they’ll say they’re giving you something for free, and then they say, “It’s free, just give me what you think you owe me.”  And then they get mad if you think that means you owe them nothing.

 

English is the lingua franca but there are like a hundred different languages floating around and mixing with each other all the time.  Gha is the one spoken in Accra.  Other nearby languages include Twee and Ewe.  They’re all in the same family and the people there refer to them only as “dialects” but they’re all quite different, really.  Like French and English.

 

It’s really really hot in Ghana.  Like 100F or so on most days.  It’s very close to the “center of the Earth” (0 longitude and 0 latitude) and they’re very proud of that.  Kids will play soccer with a black ball at noon on those 100F days though like it’s no big deal.  They say that it only takes you a week to get used to it.  We didn’t have a week.  We did see a lot of people walking around with pants and suits on though, wondering how they could do it.

 

The political system is pretty good there.  It’s listed as the second-best government in Africa by some NGO – only Mauritius is listed as having a better one.  There are a number of parties, but there are just a few main really strong ones, and power often switches hands between them peacefully at election times.  Since there’s at least three main parties – I think one guy I talked to listed up to six big competitors – the parliament has to form coalitions.  Recently they built a “Seat of Power” for the government, and it cost a crapload of money, but they’re yet to move into the building and sort of refuse to do so…

 

Everyone in Ghana is quite in love with Barack Obama.  The bus driver we had for our village stay had a picture of him fist-pounding Michelle taped to his windshield and that was the only picture he had.  No wife, kids, mom or dad, just the Obamas.  There are a lot of American flags hanging around that have Obama’s face planted right in the middle of the striped area.  A lot of people wear Obama shirts regularly, the way people in the US wear American Eagle shirts.  People in Ghana are actually quite aware of American politics in general, and a lot of kids were asked how the health care bill turned out and what else was going on, and then asked if a number of other characters were still on the scene (“Is McCain around?  Will Joe Biden be president next?  What about Hillary?”).  Pretty impressive, really.

 

There are really strange advertisements for Ghanaian movies posted up all over the place.  I can’t tell if they’re porn or not, but they certainly look like it.  They have names like “I Need a Husband” and “Love & Sex” and “Secret Love” and the posters are always fairly suggestive and sometimes include a topless woman (covering herself with her hands, or turned away).  They’re so up-front about it that I really can’t believe it might be porn, though.  My one friend Andrew took a pretty close look at a few of them, he said, and didn’t think they were.  I guess I’ll believe him for now.

 

Family is everything in Ghana, as it is in most of West Africa.  The economy isn’t great and in each family, chances are that only one person is probably going to make a good income, and they’re expected to use it to support everyone.  So families live in “compounds” instead of houses, and perhaps the oldest brother will be a business owner or a preacher or something, and his income will support his wife/wives and their children, his brothers and their wives and their children.  Numbers can get up to about 20 or so.  This isn’t to say that no one else does anything at all – everyone tries to do some sort of work, whether paid or just growing food for the compound – but if you have a good income, you’re probably in charge of a compound.  There’s also an understanding that your family will do anything for you pretty much no matter what, as long as its within their means.  If you get sick and can’t work, they come to cook and take care of you.  If you need to buy a suit to go to a job interview, they help you out.  If you need help constructing your house, you call them.

 

Religion is huge and interesting in Ghana.  Pentecostal Christianity is taking a really strong hold, which is kind of scary to me, but they love it.  There are advertisements everywhere for people running “fellowships,” which are basically just charismatic preachers running churches and masses or whatever.  I mean everywhere.  Billboards, posters, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, internet, whatever.  People get really into it, and a lot of people, when I asked them what they did for fun, included going to services.  Of course they can get involved in service, and so they’ll spend time to practice singing, dancing, speaking, playing, etc., before every service, and that makes a group of friends, too.  So that’s the Western part of religion there.  There’s also still a strong traditional influence on “religion” in Africa.  Ancestor worship has been huge there since forever ago and it still is pretty much that way.  If something bad happens to you, it might be because you angered your ancestors and they stopped protecting you.  Ancestors are resistant to change, and thus so is much of society, because when you need their protection, you have to live the way they did.  There’s also still belief in “witchcraft.”  Not like casting spells, just that there isn’t really another word for it.  People can become “cursed,” often caused by someone cursing them (the “witch”), and then bad things will just keep happening to them.  Cures range from herbs to vomiting to prayer to exorcisms.  Witches are usually women.

 

It’s hard to describe this.  It’s kind of just like… someone is out to get you, but instead of physically doing something to you, they just curse you with supernatural force.  When someone dies, this is often used to explain it, even if they were killed in a car crash or something.  Why were they in that place at that time?  Because the lady you dislike down the street cursed them.

 

The cities are pretty modern, but like 70% of Ghana is still rural.  They’re getting modern too, and water access and electricity is spreading slowly, but currently most villages don’t have clean water or electricity.  Most of these places survive on subsistence farming and fishing with a little bit of market revenue from women who produce some sort of good that the village may specialize in.

 

Foofoo is the big food in Ghana.  It’s okay.

 

They make a lot of cocoa.  #1 cocoa producer in the world.  It’s, again, pretty okay.  They sell it in a solidified powder with no butter/milk/etc., so it’s chalky.  But the taste is pretty good I guess.

 

Okay, we’re at 1600 words again.  You can Wikipedia the rest.  I think I’m gonna move on to stuff I did.

 

Peace out.

Waterscraper

//

 

We were in an industrial port again in Ghana.  One night I just noticed that there was this ENORMOUS structure off the back of the Explorer, and I wondered what it was.  My first thought was that it was a building.  It looked pretty squarish and like it was all wrapped in white stuff, and it was just too huge to be a boat.  I got closer and noticed a paved strip going to the bottom of it.  Parking garage?  No, then I realized it WAS a boat, and it was just an insanely enormous boat.  Have you ever looked at an industrial port and seen those enormous containers with MAERSK written on the side?  Trucks would load those things on, drive right up the paved gangway onto the ship, drop them off, and then come out of ANOTHER ROAD inside the ship going the opposite direction.  It must have been like nine decks high and as wide at the top as it was at the bottom, which is pretty crazy.  I could only imagine what the hell the inside of that thing looked like.  The librarian was watching it with me.  He told me that they would drive cars off in lines and have them sit there right near the Explorer, probably for inspection, and then they would drive away.  Sometimes only one car would drive and it would tow the others away.  Sometimes the MAERSK things would back up onto the ship which was craaaazy, but less crazy when I found out they could rotate the position of the driver’s seat.

 

It was gone the next time I looked for it.

Holding a Bowl

//

 

I had an overnight stay at a village arranged with a group of people through SAS.  We met in the Union at like 8am, I think.  The Abowitz kids were running around being really cute.  They would come up behind people and then one would cover the person’s eyes while the other took one of their shoes.  Then the girl would shout “Retreat!  Retreat!” and they’d run away with your shoe.  The girl is about 10 and the boy is about 8.  The girl always looks like she’s plotting something, which apparently she is.  Anyway, they came back to the people later and would cover their eyes and put the shoe back on their foot, which was nice of them, and then shout “Retreat!  Retreat!” and run away.  I didn’t get angry or anything when they did it to me.  It wasn’t until they had “gotten away” safely that I realized not being upset was the wrong thing to do, and they probably would be having much more fun if I had started chasing them and picked them up and thrown them around or something.

 

Live and learn.

 

Anyway, we got on the busses a bit late, but at least they worked.  Another group was there waiting until 8:30 or so since about 6:30.  They were all really pissed.

 

There were a good number of my friends on the bus, but a lot of them were closer to each other than to me, so I was afraid I wouldn’t have anyone to sit with.  I got on the bus pretty early and took a seat in the back, and I saw my friend Dierdre getting on later and about to take a seat I think by herself.  “Dierdre, come be friends with me!”  And she said, “Oh, okay,” and came to take a seat next to me.  I got lucky that time and didn’t have the wheel well.

 

The ride was long but also pretty cool.  We went through the city and then through a long plain area with a mountain running constantly in the background but never very high.  We saw the Twin Rocks.  We drove past the second largest dam of the Volta Region and I think saw part of the Volta River, though I’m not really sure where we were.  There were gates on the road over the dam, but all you had to do was get out of your vehicle, open them, drive through, and then close them… so we wondered why they were there at all.

 

We made it to the village and like every single person in the village was in the center shady tree area waiting for us.  The elders were all on one side, and some who looked like chiefs were in the very center.  Two were holding staffs with animal sculptures at the top.  Seated further back was an older man than those with staffs, and he was holding a machete.  We went to shake hands with all of them, which was kind of awkward, and I said “Akwaba” to them, which is just hello.  I tried to look them all in the eyes but some didn’t seem interested.

 

We were all seated in plastic chairs that had “I <3 GHANA” carved out of them in the factory in the middle of the whole village.  They were playing drums and dancing and it had this weird xenophobic/nationalistic feel to it, like at any point they could come kill us.  There was a man on a microphone saying things in a different language, which added to the feel of it all.  Kids danced in a specific way that included moving their shoulders, hands, and pelvis a whole lot, and they always touched the ground like to pray or something before they danced.  Sometimes they asked us to get up and dance with them.  I didn’t really want to, but when you’re someone’s guest and they ask you individually to dance, you kind of have to.  How I longed for diffusion of responsibility!  Well anyway.

 

They also called us all up individually to give us a “traditional name,” which supposedly they have to do for any visitor.  I don’t really believe that.  I doubt when the plumbers came to install the water pipes they had a naming ceremony.  I talked to a prof about this and they said, “I’m sure that’s for the old rich white people who want to go home and say I visited an African village and was named Yao Nukunu, which means Wonder!”  That’s actually the name I was given.  Anyway, I guess it was cool enough but it took like three hours or something and we didn’t really learn much from it except for they like to dance.

 

OH.  OH, okay.  So early on in the ceremony while others were dancing, a mother took her daughter to the middle of the area and put a bowl in her hand and made her hold it up about chest level and then just left her there for like five minutes, then came back.  Deirdre was still sitting next to me and we saw it and looked at each other like, “Um… what the hell?  Why is that girl holding a bowl?”  We thought it was some freak occurrence and wrote it off as someone being cute or weird.  But then it happened again, and again.  Little girls standing and holding bowls while other people danced.  One time when they made all the white people get up and dance, there was a girl holding a bowl.  That became an inside joke between the two of us.  “What’ve you been up to?”  “Holdin’ a bowl.”

 

All the boys wore peach uniforms for the school and the girls wore green.  They weren’t really uniforms, more just clothes with the right colors.

The Mess Hall

//

 

After the super long naming ceremony, we went off with our partner from SAS and our host family, all of whom were assigned to us.  I was with a tall dude named Andrew and our host was Pius.  He was the computer repairman, technology teacher, cell phone and movie salesman for the village.  Apparently he came to this town specifically because they were looking for help with all those things.  His first language was Twee, which wasn’t spoken there.  Ewe was the main language, and it seemed he’d picked it up, ‘cuz he talked to everyone there just fine.

 

We went back to his place, which was a five-minute walk or so through the town.  A little boy held my hand the whole way but didn’t say a word.  I wondered why he picked me, and I still wonder if they tell the little kids to do that.  The place we were sleeping was fine, it had a fan and a window and two beds that looked comfortable and big enough.  There were no mosquito nets, which worried us a little, but that actually turned out to be no big deal.

 

We were eating lunch somewhere else that day, so we went back to the bus to get there.  Apparently it was near the dam, which wasn’t too far away.  Oh, also apparently this whole village was forced to move when they constructed the dam.  Damn.

 

We made it to the mess hall and washed our hands, and as happens in every large SAS trip, the girls just walked into the boys’ bathroom because their line was too damn long.  We don’t really care as long as the urinals are hidden.  It wasn’t a restaurant, which made me happy, I hate it when we leave poor places to go to super fancy restaurants.  This is the same mess hall where the dam workers eat lunch.  They had French fries which were incredibly popular, and chicken, which was pretty good.  I took some soda, I think – I forget if they even had water.  I had a nice conversation with the girls sitting near me, including Brittany and Ally, though I can’t really remember what we talked about in particular.

 

We ended up waiting there for a LONG time.  We were supposed to leave after like an hour or so, but we ended up being there for almost 2.5 hours.  Apparently the bus wasn’t back yet, or there was something wrong with it.  All the busses were from China and they broke down extremely often.  Kids fell asleep at their tables.  Even though they just had ice cream and soda which probably had caffeine.  Oh well.  We finally did get back on the bus and made it back to the village.