Above and below are jacaranda trees along a street near the hospital Moinhos de Vento in Porto Alegre where Mariza was born. Trees really make the place. In a short time, the flowers will come out. I got here with the nearly bare branches. The long little leaves are from other plants that grow along with the trees. It is still early spring in POA.
Below is the Hospital Moihnos de Vento where Mariza was born. I took a picture of the old part. There is now a really big complex. Porto Alegre has become a health care center. This hospital started out as the deutsche krankenhaus, when POA was still a German center.
Below is the farmer market and below that is a church. I liked the view but don’t know more about it.
City life peaked in the late 19th & early 20th Century. It was before cars took over cities, but after lots of important things like clean water, electricity and trams were available. It was also before planning and architecture fell under the sway of modernists, who forgot how to build attractive things. People still felt proud of their accomplishments and built to reflect civic pride.
I took a little more time to look at Porto Alegre. The city has improved a lot. I was familiar with some of the buildings before, but they had often been a a poor state of repair or in bad neighborhoods. Both conditions have improved. The first group of pictures is from an old Brahma Brewery. When I lived in POA, they actually made beer there and you couldn’t see much because it was behind a wall. It is now up-scale condos and shops, but you can see the original buildings and the details that they rarely include in buildings anymore.
Above and below details from Brahma
Below is King Gambrinus, the legendary inventor of hopped-malt beer we all know and love.
Below is the Caixa da Aqua – the water works – build about the same time as the Brahma Brewery. It must have been a heady time for Porto Alegre. Pure water has done more for public health than almost anything else.
Visiting the Porto Alegre BNC was a lot like visiting home. It was the first BNC I worked with and it set the pattern for what I think of them. Since I have indeed written about BNCs on several occasions, I refer you to those entries for some of the general details about BNCs. Suffice to say that I am very fond of BNCs and consider them one of the best ways for us to reach youth in Brazil.
Porto Alegre presents a bit of a challenge, since they have subcontracted their English teaching to a private firm. They still run to operation; they do cultural programs, youth ambassador selections & the other things we value in BNCs. Beyond that, they have the tradition of being a BNC and a board of directors well connected with the local community. I wonder if this kind of hybrid organization will become more common and there could be a time when the definition of BNC is lost. If you look to goals, does the exact method matter?
One of the women at the BNC remembered when I used to do lectures at there. We did a lot of things with the BNC in those days. I remember our old friend and first consul George Lannon when they showed me the auditorium. We did a cowboy film festival there. It was low budget but very popular. All we did was show a different cowboy movie every week. George would tell something about the film and the director. This was something he knew and had a passion about. We started with “Stage Coach” directed by John Ford. This is the film that made John Wayne a star. We featured several John Wayne films, as befits a Western series. The one I appreciated the most was “the Searchers.” I think we ended with “Cheyenne Autumn,” also directed by John Ford, but not featuring John Wayne. You don’t need a lot of money to do a good program. Usually, 90% of success is just showing up.
Curitiba BNC called “Inter” is doing better now after going through hard times ten years ago. They now have around 3,500 students at any one time. They had more in the past, but the good news is that the numbers are growing. Inter has six satellite campuses, including a fast growing operation at one of the local shopping centers.
In addition to teaching English to Brazilians, Inter teaches Portuguese to foreigners, mostly MBA students working on doing business in Brazil programs at ISAE/Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Curitiba. FGV currently has nineteen students learning Portuguese at the BNC.
I wrote about FGV in São Paulo in other posts. The one in Curitiba is also impressive. They have partnerships with Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina, George Washington University and the University of Cincinnati. I have been extremely impressed with the people at FGV whenever I have met them. I am glad that we can work with them on many occasions.
My picture at top show part of the library at the BNC in Curitiba. Below that is FGV. The last picture is the old army HQ in PAO, recently restored. It has nothing to do with the article, but I thought it was a nice picture. The colors were good.
I didn’t appreciate Porto Alegre when I was here a quarter century ago. Your feelings about people and places often reflect your feelings about yourself. Times were hard, for me and for Brazil. Chrissy and I were abysmally poor. I didn’t make much as a junior officer and more than half of my take home pay went to paying off student loans. Beyond that, starting off in a new career, I had to buy suits and other work-related stuff. Because of my particular position, we also had to buy all sorts of reasonably high-quality dishes and plates for at home entertaining. To top it all off, Mariza was born in Porto Alegre. Babies bring great joy, but they are hard work and they cost a lot of money.
Now add in professional problems. This was my first independent post. My boss was thousands of miles away and they really neglected me. I liked being left alone, as I mentioned in the previous post, but I realize now that I really needed a little more direction or “mentoring” than I got. I worked too hard. Well, I worked too hard in the wrong way. I didn’t understand the old saying that you have to first seek to understand before being understood. I would have been better off “working” to get to know the society better rather than working on the ostensible work in the office. It would have been more fun too. Sometimes you can go farther faster by running slower.
Finally, it was a hard time for Brazil. The Brazilians were not happy with themselves so it was harder for them to be happy with us. I was there during the “Cruzado Plan”. They changed the currency and put on all sorts of price controls. This created shortages and black markets. I remember it was even hard to get Coca-Cola.
It is better now for me, for them and better in general.
Porto Alegre seems like home and is familiar even with the big changes. It is funny. The place is full of Mariza. I keep on “seeing” my baby girl in all the places we took her and even in the places we didn’t because she was always on my mind. That was another thing I didn’t appreciate at the time. I get a similar feeling in SE Washington, BTW, near the old Oakwood. It is filled with Alex from when he was a baby. Sometimes I just used to sit on the bench there and absorb that. I have never really understood those feelings. They are bitter-sweet, as it is with remembering intense things past.
So there were lots of reason I didn’t appreciate the place or the time. I am better now and so the beauty of the place is easier to see.
The pictures show the beauty of the place. The first two are Parque Farroupilha where I used to run. Below is the street we lived on in a neighborhood called Moinhos de Vento. The streets are lined with jacaranda trees. I got to POA a few days to early. Soon they would be in beautiful purple flowers. It was a nice neighborhood then; it is fantastic now, with lots of shops and restaurants within walking distance down pleasant streets. The swings are in Parque Moinhos de Vento, where we used to take Mariza to play. It looks like it is the same equipment. The bottom picture is Zaffari, the grocery store where we used to shop. It is within walking distance from our old house. Zaffari is a chain of supermarkets. They are really nice, maybe like Wegmans in the U.S.
Here are a few more pictures relevant to the story that I didn’t post.
We were reunited, my old staff in Porto Alegre. It has been almost twenty-five years since I went boldly & over confidently to run the USIA post at the southern end of Brazil. Paulo, Ula and Cezar came to the reunion, along with Ulla’s niece. Our driver, Azambuja, died, so he didn’t show up. At least nobody saw. But we told stories about him, which kept him there in spirit. Azambuja had the interesting habit of talking about himself in the third person and talking to himself generally, so maybe it was not that different.
Paulo and Ula are in their 80s. Cezar is a little younger than I am, i.e. a very young man. Reunions are always bittersweet. Porto Alegre was my first post. I made all kinds of mistakes and my loyal staff saved me from the embarrassment of getting knocked my own overconfidence. The initial condition has a great influence on subsequent developments. My bosses were thousands of miles away in Brasilia and they generally neglected me down at the end of the road. I got to/had to make decisions that were beyond my pay grade. Being in PAO in POA helped me develop a sense of self reliance, which today makes me admirably independent or weirdly idiosyncratic, depending on who you ask or when. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
The work was different back then. We were really isolated. I don’t think that you can be that isolated anywhere in the world today. Even in the desert in Iraq, we had the latest news. In Porto Alegre I couldn’t get an English-language newspaper until a couple days later. Most days I had no contact with either Washington or Brasilia. I didn’t really miss that. We didn’t have easy access to CNN. We had a couple of horrible computers, that didn’t really do anything but word processing and didn’t do that well. Generally, I would write with pen and paper and Ula would type or use the telex. Back then, I could plausibly deny that I had the chance to consult with my superiors. It is different now. I like the Internet, but I think we communicate too much now. It is better to let the person on the spot make decisions whenever possible. Because we can, we too often ask for advice even on small matters and too often want to micro-manage the work of far-off colleagues. My father told me that you should not spend a dollar to make a dime decision. He was right.
Talking to my old friends, I remembered the lines of an epitaph, “As you are now, so once was I; as I am now, so shall you be.” I remember back then looking at Paulo & Ulla as a little behind the times. I was young, up-to-day & filled with best ideas a new MBA could have. I was riding the wave of the big trends of the late 1980s. It gets harder to keep up with trends and eventually you just don’t. Some of the trends are going nowhere anyway. The things I learned from reading the Greek classics are still with me and still useful. Many of the things I learned as a sharp MBA are perniciously out of date.
Ula and Paulo have had good lives, full of accomplishments and generally good health into old age. That is all we humans really get on this earth. The young look forward with great expectations. The view from the other end is a little sad, but it shouldn’t be if you can say “I fought the good fight, I finished my course, I kept the faith.”
Curitiba reminds me of a European city. Immigrants from Germany, Poland, Ukraine and many other places brought themselves and their ideas and it made a big difference. During my one-day visit, three people mentioned Polish roots. That might not seem like very many, but considering the size of the sample and that they brought it up, it is significant. On the other hand, I don’t doubt that I affect the conversation when talking about the places I lived. It is the thing experts caution you about when you gather information. You often find what you are looking for or at least what you expect. When all your interlocutors seem interested in the same things, it is useful to recall that the only common threat in all this is you. Nevertheless, I would not have found them if they had not been there.
The picture above shows a “typical” Polish Brazilian house. It was a farm house someplace outside Curitiba. The city took it apart and put it back together near the urban planning center to show the history of Paraná. I heard that there is a whole Polish village in one of the parks. Pope John Paul II visited when he was in Brazil. I didn’t have the time to go.
Poles used to use the term “Polonia” to describe the Polish diaspora and sometimes counted overseas Poles as part of the Polish nation. This made some sense, since for 123 there was no Polish political entity but there were Poles and a Polish nation (narod). But it doesn’t apply much anymore.
Germans, Ukrainians and others also had a big impact around Curitiba. Rooms in the library at Positivo University were named after important local figures. I noticed that the last names tended to sound German or Slavic, while the first names were usually Brazilian. That tells the story. As in the U.S., immigrants tend to be absorbed within two or three generations. They still may be proud of their roots, but those roots are largely sentimental, a few words of the old language, taste for traditional foods. Both foods and words are modified by local flavors.
I am sure that I could find someone in Curitiba with the same ethnic mix (German-Polish) as I have, maybe even a cousin. But after a minute of talking about our “common” heritage we would revert to our true identities: American and Brazilian. The past is a different country. If we kept on talking about it, we would remember that our ancestors left the old country because they thought things were better in the New World & they were right.
Roots are good, even if they are often mostly mythical or folkloric. Immigrants change societies. The very fact of leaving creates changes people. They see some of their old culture is good, but lots just don’t apply. The new society also takes the best and leaves the rest. This makes everybody better off. I don’t know if a hot dog is better than its German ancestor, but it is more popular and I admit that I usually like the American version of ethnic food better than the “real thing.”
The modified-alloyed culture is almost always more robust, at least in the sense of providing more options. After all, both the U.S. and Brazil are the New World.
I am not a big admirer of modern art, although I am learning to like it better. We usually appreciate things as we learn more about them and get more accustomed to them. It is like exposing your kids to vegetables. Eventually they get to like them at least some. I also understand that this art is popular among many of our friends and I can see the potential for exchanges and cooperation between our Brazilian friends and American counterparts. In our work, the relationships are what count. Art, music & information are the shared interests that make the human connections work and make our work interesting. That is why we scheduled meetings with leaders at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba and a couple days later at the Fundação Iberé Camargo in Porto Alegre.
The Oscar Niemeyer Museum includes lots of his work as permanent exhibits and the works of other artists rotate through. During my visit, they were showing Polish poster art. The Fundação Iberé Camargo has a similar policy, with one floor devoted to the work of their eponymous artist and the others featuring temporary collections. (FYI – Most people are familiar with Oscar Niemeyer. Iberé Camargo was a Brazilian expressionist from Rio Grande do Sul.) In both cases, the most remarkable part of the installations for me was not the art itself, but rather the cultural communities built around the museums and the buildings that housed them, which were also works of art.
(Among the people I was supposed to meet in Porto Alegre was Eva Sopher, the woman responsible for the Theatro São Pedro. You can see the Theatro just above. Notice that it is spelled in the old fashioned way, with an h. It was from her that I first learned to appreciate the importance of the total community that clusters around any cultural center. I wrote a post about this a couple years ago and if you read this post I suggest you read that one too at this link. I added the picture, BTW, so it is the same in both, but I took it on this most recent trip. Unfortunately, Eva couldn’t make it to our meeting. I wanted to tell her the story. I did talk to her on the phone, but I don’t think I made the point well.)
You can see in the picture of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum why they informally call it “the eye.” Fundação Iberé Camargo also has a great architecture with “floating” corridors (i.e. the hang outside the building) to get from floor to floor. The building is made from white concrete and the “floating” aspect must have been a significant engineering challenge. Nevertheless, the most striking aspect, IMO, is the beautiful location. You can see on the picture the fantastic view of Porto Alegre you get from the Fundação building.
I get to see a lot of universities and schools in my job. Many are poor with facilities that need work. But this doesn’t need to be how it is. The goal of education is to disseminate and create knowledge. I say create for the obvious reason that you cannot and should not try merely to pass information, but understand that the exchange of information changes the people and the situations involved.
The Universidade Positivo in Curitiba is as unabashedly upbeat as its name implies. It is a private university whose leaders understand that profit is the price of prosperity but also understand and cherish values of humanity. The school teaches practical things like business, where demand is high. But it also features a great theater and places for the development of the human spirit.
I was impressed first by the attitude of the leadership and then by the beautiful campus, which is only around a dozen years old. What they wanted from us was only recognition and cooperation in programs, i.e. a partnership among equals with similar goals.
Visiting the university was encouraging. These guys know how to do good and do well at the same time. They are free market proponents and made a point of showing one of their reading rooms honors Roberto Campos, who was present at the creation of the IMF and generally admired the United States of America.
I learned something I didn’t know from the tour. Brazilian private schools, like the Universidade Postitivo, must offer scholarships to 10% of their students, in order to maintain their tax-free status. These students must be from public schools and be from poor families. The university has no control over intake. Everything is based on scores from the Enem, the big that decides placement. All that matters is the scores. The university accepts students in rank order. The only caveat is that they meet the requirements of low family income and be graduate of the public school system.
The guys at Universidade Positivo told me that they were a little afraid that the quality would be low, but they were pleasantly surprised. They are getting a very select group that is doing well in the academic environment.
It is also interesting to see the general difference in selection. In the U.S. there are lots of possible criteria. Brazil is not like that. Grades and activities don’t matter. It is sort of like selecting purely on SAT scores. It is probably a fairer system then ours and it is certainly a much simpler selection process. The drawback, IMO, is that it is one dimensional. I just don’t like the idea of having a list where everybody is ranked. I think this is an okay way to select admissions, but it might leak into other aspects of life.
My pictures show the campus and the library. Classes are not in session, so you don’t see students. There are 13.000 students. Below that is the theater, based on the Greek theater at Epidaurus, which has nearly perfect acoustics. We tested it. If someone stands just in front of where Mariza is standing and talks in a normal voice, you can hear clearly all the way to the top. It is the pattern for lots of theaters, but usually uncredited. I visited with Mariza & Espen. Read about it here. The picture is along side. The interesting thing was that there was a diagram and explanation at the university telling about Epidaurus. It is part of the classical education to pay tribute to these achievements of the past. As an admirer of the achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans, I appreciate that. It is the show and tell, followed by the experience that makes knowledge stick.
Curitiba, the capital of Paraná, is the best planned city in Brazil and one of the best in the world.
They have been following a master plan since the 1940s. The city has a wonderful mass transit system. You can see the mass transit buses on my pictures. They have a system where you only pay once and then you can ride on the various types of buses. You do not pay on the bus itself. Rather you do into one of those tubes in the picture. Curitiba buses are specially designed and built in a local Volvo factory. Several doors open at one time, greatly facilitating loading and unloading. It is more like a Metro system in that respect. They are going to get an actual Metro. The Federal government will finance part and it will run under an old highway, which now bypasses the city with a ring road. The Curitiba authorities want to convert that road into a long & narrow park, with bike trails, something like the W&OD. The road currently features dedicated bus lanes. The goal is NOT to encourage automobile traffic by keeping the road open to cars.
Nobody is exactly sure why city planning is so ingrained in Curitiba. The city was lucky to have a series of good mayors and the many people in the city support an d take seriously the need for a sustainable community, but that just postpones the question as to why those things.
No matter the reason, Curitiba is a city the mostly works. Traffic is tolerable. Buildings are attractive with a good mix of old and new. The city is clean and there is a lot of green space. The green space is more than just attractive and the ponds in every park are not just for decoration. The authorities in Curitiba long ago figured out the drainage patterns of their city. The parks are in the spots where water would naturally accumulate or can be easily made to accumulate after storms. It rains a lot in Curitiba. Most cities in Curitiba’s situation suffer significant flooding and mudslide. Curitiba does not. The rains drain into the parks and ponds. The ponds overflow, but it doesn’t matter because the temporarily rising water doesn’t hurt the grass and trees along the banks. The parks are like giant rain gardens. The picture up top shows one.
When they are not flooded, which is most of the time BTW, they provide ample recreational activities.
I wasn’t sure which city Curitiba reminded me of. The obvious choice would be Portland, but I don’t think so. It is a very European city in its architecture and general feel. Many of its inhabitants have roots in Central and Eastern Europe, so much of the city itself is has the feel of Northern Germany or Poland. But the park system, with its many ponds and water features made me think of Minneapolis. As I wrote many times, places really are their own places, but I still like to search for analogies.
I have to add a little bit of a disclaimer. We spoke to an environmentalist in Porto Alegre, one who knew about urban and regional planning. He said that Curitiba is indeed a great city, but that the greater skill is in marketing. According to what he told us, Porto Alegre also has the rain garden/park idea, but they are more out of sight. He also said that Curitiba has an easier time than most cities because it is mostly a middle class place. People are well behaved (something I alluded to above) and have the culture that supports sustainable cities. It has not had the big growth of poor populations who tend to ignore zoning rules.
Of course, we agreed that a big part of making a city a place where people want to live is marketing of the city’s favorable points. The rain garden/parks are indeed functional, but it is also very important for the quality of life that they be beautiful and accessible to the people. The parts in Curitiba help define the neighborhoods and are well used. Combining beauty and function is itself a value. And causality is usually complicated and there are feedback loops that empower or inhibit trends. A city that can market itself well may become a better city as a result of the marketing and the improvements it stimulates, which makes marketing easier …
Speaking of marketing, the bottom picture show a “tree immune to cutting”. Curitiba has designated some especially nice trees as protected and they have that sign. It is mostly marketing, but it calls attention to the beauty of the tree and the commitment to protect it. A less conspicuous marking could to the job but would fail on awareness.
My bottom line is that I like Curitiba. If I was a Brazilian I would certainly consider living there.
