Category: Brazil

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Belém First Contact

Flying into Belém you see a kind of water world.  The Amazon splits into many rivers, with lots of islands. Streets are lined with very big mango trees, some planted a century ago.  I was told that that drivers here have to buy special mango insurance, since the heavy fruit so often fall on cars, denting the hoods. But the trees are beautiful & worth the trouble.  They make the city feel much more comfortable and lower the overall temperature.  

Since we (Justen and I) got into town late, we didn’t have time to do too much. BTW, my picture is not good because of the late hour. It was dark. But those trees were really impressive and I wanted to get a picture for today’s post.  We did find time to visit the offices of one of the major media firms, that owns newspapers, webpages and RBA (Rede Brasil Amazônia de Televisão)  Rede Bandeirantes in Belém.  We spoke to the boss, who is a good contact of some of my Embassy colleagues, but who I had never met.  He was a very nice guy who spoke to us in English, explaining that he had family in Charlotte, NC and had lots of connections with the U.S.  

He explained that Pará was getting more prosperous.  The initial impetus was the vast mineral wealth.  Vale (Compania Vale do Rio Doce) has mountains of iron, enough to supply the world for decades,  and Alcoa has similar amounts of bauxite. There is also the wealth from forestry and agriculture.  But Pará has now moved beyond simple resource based economics.  At first this was because services had by necessity followed firms like Vale or Alcoa, but now the economics is self-sustaining.  

A small but important help to Belém would be regular direct flights to Miami. Belém is closer to Florida than it is to some other parts of Brazil in terms of easy of access.  This may soon happen, as firms add flights in response to growing demand.

We talked about educations, a subject always important in Brazil and making sure Pará was included in initiatives, since all the economic growth will require a more sophisticated labor force.  Not everyone is as aware of the opportunities as might be desired, nor are people aware how easy it is to study in the U.S.  We discussed doing webchats on the study in the U.S. and the Science w/o borders program. The beauty of the web format is that we can do it from Brasília or anywhere else and still tap into the network in Pará. This is something worth following and perhaps using in other places.  The Amazônia site gets about two million visitors a month.   

We had supper with five alumni YA and English immersion students.  These are all smart kids.  The older ones are completing their university studies.  We talked in about the program and about things in general. One of the participants was planning to apply to Science w/o Borders and another said that he would after we explained it to him. He had been unaware of the opportunity.  

I have never met a YA who was not wildly enthusiastic about the experience.  Their challenge is staying in touch with colleagues, which they all want to do.  This is something we should be more active in helping. These networks will prove extremely valuable to participants.   As they move up in Brazilian society, and they certainly will, they can network with participants from all over Brazil.  It is a great program and we need to make sure it keeps on paying dividends. 

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Youth Week

Last week was our youth and education week.  Our posts in Brasília, São Paulo, Rio and Recife processed almost 600 program participants (37 Youth Ambassadors, 20 Student Leaders, and 540 Public School English Teachers, CAPL).   This launch is a big step in a continuing success in connection the American and the Brazilian nations and an investment in the future.

The biggest group was the 540 teachers of English. Minister of Education Mercadante and Ambassador Shannon gave the high profile send off in Brasília as did teams in São Paulo, Rio, and Recife.  Our Brazilian friends recognize the need for English and they are encouraging progress with a six week capacity building programs at eighteen higher education institutions throughout the U.S.  The picture above is from that event.  We also signed an agreement to keep the program going with another 540 teachers going out in July.

Our part of the program is identifying programs in the U.S. as well has helping with visas and logistics.  Our Brazilian friends are doing the heavy lifting and supporting the teachers.  I love this program and I am proud of the input we had in helping shape it.  Participants are all public school teachers representing all twenty-six states in Brazil plus the Federal District.  We all think that spreading the benefits to all corners of the country is an important goal.  I got to meet a lot of the teachers.  For many, this was their first time travelling outside Brazil and many had not even travelled much within Brazil. This will be a life changing experience for them and I hope they will be able to change and improve the lives of countless students when they get back.  This is a big deal and being part of the aspirations of so many people is a fantastic privilege.

I have written about Youth Ambassadors before.  The Youth Ambassadors are also chosen from public schools with special care taken to make sure that every Brazilian state is represented.  This is “our” program in that we organize it, but it also has become a shared success with our Brazilian partners.  We had almost 17,000 applicants for the thirty-seven available slots.  Our partners throughout Brazil winnow this number down to a manageable number (about 200).  After that, my colleagues read through all applications and make the final choices.  It is a tough job. We could easily send 500 w/o diminishing quality, but I don’t have the staff or the cash to make it happen.  I am trying to think of ways to get somebody else to take up some of the slack. 

This year we are partnering with EMBRATUR for the first time. EMBRATUR is the Brazilian tourist agency.   One of the reasons why Youth Ambassadors is so well accepted here is that it truly is a partnership.  We are not just explaining America to Brazilians but also helping Americans understand Brazilians.  EMBRATUR helped with materials and information, helping our Youth Ambassadors know their own country.  Many of the Youth Ambassadors have not traveled much in Brazil and it is great to have a partner like EMBRATUR.

This week we also launched this year’s Student Leaders.  Twenty of them will go to University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  The Student Leaders are older than the Youth Ambassadors and different from the SwB students because they are studying subjects such as political science and history. I think we generally do a good job with youth in Brazil because we have such great youth to work with.  I am inspired when I talk to them and glad that they want to learn about the U.S.

We held a big pizza party at Casa Thomas Jefferson to honor all the groups that were leaving from Brasília.  Similar events were held in Rio, São Paulo and Recife, but I can best describe ours.  141 “youth” showed up for the party.  I put youth in quotation marks because the teachers are youth in comparison to me but maybe not all are youth in comparison to … very young people.  One of our staff acted as MC and did a wonderful job.   Everyone seemed to have a good time, but it was a little loud for me. The Youth Ambassadors seemed to love Gangham style.  I didn’t know what that was until a few weeks ago and I can see why kids like it.  They all got up and danced frenetically when it came on.  I didn’t dance.

Pictures show some of the groups, plus the pizza makers and CTJ Southwest. 

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Ghosts of New Year Past

I put the boys on the plane back to the U.S.  I talked to Chrissy on Skype.  Right now I am watching a nature show with Portuguese narration about New Zealand.  New Year Eve party.  As you can see the picture up top, I have all I really need. 

I do not plan to swim in that whiskey river, at least not very far,  maybe one drink when the clock strikes midnight Brasilia time.

I don’t feel sorry for myself. This is my choice and among my preferred outcomes given the other choices. I had several options for New Year events, but I don’t much like the sorts of parties.  It goes beyond just being boring, which I suppose I am. New Year has never been a happy time for me. I suspect it is not happy for lots of people, which accounts for much of the alcohol addling that accompanies most celebrations. 

When I was a kid, New Year meant that I stayed up late watching the late-late movies.  In those days TV was not twenty-four hours.  On most days, the stations would sign off around 2am with the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.  New Year was different. 

My strongest New Year memory is a very sad feeling. It must have been 1972. I had been in the hospital after spiting up blood. Our doctor called it an ulcer. The diagnosis later kept me out of the Air Force. It also ruined my swim team season.  I think it was a misdiagnosis, since it never recurred, but who knows.  More serious was my mother’s health.  We knew there was something seriously wrong, but the (same) doctor couldn’t figure it out.  She died of leukemia nine months later. I didn’t know this would happen, but I remember thinking that things would not be the same, if for no other reason that I was growing up. 

I went down into the basement, where we had a refrigerator with Coke. Even then I drank a lot of the stuff (even though I was not supposed to because of the “ulcer”).  Our basement was a little bit creepy.  It was not finished.  My father and grandfather had done a little work, but they were usually drunk when they worked and you could tell.  It was also full of spiders and perpetually damp, so damp and full of spiders that when my pet newt escaped his terrarium he managed to survive two years down there, with sufficient habitat.    When you wanted to turn the lights on or off, you loosened or tightened the bulbs on the ceiling. 

It was one of those times when reality just bites. Outside was sub-zero Wisconsin winter and I could hear the wind.  The one bulb that I screwed in threw harsh light that didn’t reach into most of the corners.  It was around midnight and I was the only one awake.  I sang auld lang syne to myself in a quiet voice, not all the words.  I didn’t know all the words then and I don’t know them now.  And I didn’t know what auld lang syne meant.  But I mumbled as much as I knew and then went back up to watch the Late-late movies. 

The movies were a strange choice for New Year festivities.  TV 6 showed a bunch of World War II movies.  I don’t remember details, except that one of them ended with an American soldier in the Philippines trying to make a radio broadcast as the Japanese advanced.  He repeated “Manila calling, Manila calling”.

I don’t vouch for all the details of this forty year memory.  But that is what I recall. 

I spent the New Year 1974 working at Medusa Cement.  I was working the night shifts unloading hopper cars.  I made good money, but it was cold outside and the work was outside, in the dark.  We had to open the bottoms of the hopper cars with heavy crowbars.  I couldn’t get a good grip with my gloves on, so I took them off.  Cold metal against warm skin gives you a good grip but creates a bit of pain.  We would work outside as long as we could tolerate it and then retreat to a shack where we had a kind of propane heater shaped like a torpedo.  That thing threw off lots of heat and fumes.  My associate, a guy called LC Duckworth, the strongest man I ever met, actually set the leg of his coveralls on fire by trying to warm his feet too fast.  I helped put him out.

I most enjoyed riding the cars. We had to push them off and jump on the back, turning the break as fast as we could when we got near the end of the track, which would have taken us in the KK River.  It could be kind of exciting. 

Our operation was on the river, as mentioned above,  from which I could see the clock at Allen Bradley.  At the time, this was the largest four sided clock in the world.  We used to call it the Polish Moon.  Next to it was a temperature sign. As I watched the clock reach midnight on January 1, 1974, the temperature listed was minus five Fahrenheit. 

You can see my old cement company as it looks now at this link.  Below is the Allen Bradley clock in a different season.

My work during the Christmas break kept me solvent through the spring semester, but I didn’t use all the money I earned wisely.  I bought a bunch of booze and held a belated New Year party for my friends.   I was determined to enjoy their company w/o drinking myself.  I learned that it is impossible to enjoy yourself as the one sober person in a room full of drunks.  The jokes just are not as funny.  So I decided to catch up.  In short order, I drank a full bottle of Tequila and I remember nothing else until the next morning, when I tried to get out of bed, but couldn’t. I had never been so sick before and so far have not been since.  I couldn’t actually move around, or even keep down water until around 7pm.  Then I was really hungry and thirsty.  Tequila used to be my booze of choice, but I have not consumed a drop of tequila since January 4, 1974. Can’t even abide the smell.  

A few years later, when I didn’t have a Christmas break job, my friends and I  went out to the bars and night clubs.  I don’t recall the year, but it was probably around 1976. In those days, you could legally drink at 18 in Wisconsin.  We went down to Lincoln Avenue to a place called the President’s Club.  I don’t know how we chose it, but it was full of old people. They did not appreciate us and we didn’t enjoy their company, so we decided to go to Crazy Horse, a younger person club near the airport. 

I don’t recall why, but our friend Mark decided that he would ride on top of the car, mind you that this is Wisconsin with -10 nights in January.   He got up on top of the car, sort of like a deer during hunting season, and hung on for the 2 ½ miles from Lincoln Avenue to the airport.  He was never quite the same after that, but you have to respect his ability to hold on.  There really isn’t a lot to hold onto on top of a car. Jerry had a Cutlass Supreme, which had landau roof, giving a little more traction, but not that much.

After these experiences, I adapted to a more boring party scene. The only one that really stand out in the latter days is New Year 1985. Chrissy and I were invited to a kind of command performance at a fancy club called Leopoldina in Porto Alegre. It was actually a pleasant time.  With a lot of good canape. The place was not far from our house, so we could walk back, making it possible for us to drink more freely. It was a warm night in the middle of the antipodal summer and the place had a pool with a cover on the middle. Our friend Pedro drank a few too many caipirinhas. He jumped in the water and swam under the cover, coming up on the other side, evidently just to prove he could.  It was not the usual type of behavior expected at such events. All of us just kind of pretended it didn’t happen – even when it was happening – and never spoke of it again.  But the next year Pedro’s invitation ostensibly got lost in the mail.

This New Year will not produce any funny or sad stories.  Well, maybe an old guy drinking a glass of Jim Beam chased by Coke Zero is funny or sad, but I am content.  “Sou Cesar” is coming on TV. That should take me through the new year.

BTW – if you doubt the theory of evolution, take a look at my boys in the second picture.  I kind of expected one of them to pick up a bone and start smashing stuff to the strains of “also sprach Zarathustra”.  In fairness, the sun was in their eyes.    

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Salto do Itiquira & the Beautiful Goiás Countryside

The water drops 168 meters, creating a constant wind and spray.  It is exhilarating to walk toward the falls, surrounded by sound and mist. You soon get soaked.

The facilities were more primitive when I visited here twenty-six years ago and there were no rules.  For example, you could swim in the pool right under the falls.  I suppose if you were dumb enough to actually swim under the falls, you would get hurt or maybe killed, which is why it is now illegal to swim I the upper pool at all.   It would be hard to get there anyway.   The current pushing out from the falls is very strong and I remember being unable to swim against it – and that was back when I was strong.

Today there is a decent restaurant at the gate to the falls and a paved road that leads all the way there.  The biggest challenge getting there is going through the town of Formosa.  It is not a bad little city, but it is no longer a little city.  The signs directing you to the falls are fairly good.  I would never have found my way through that warren of streets w/o them. 

IMO the drive from Formosa to the falls was worth the trip just by itself.   The Goiás landscape, as I have mentioned in other posts, is very pleasant, especially this time of the year.  Everything is intensely green with beautiful hills in the background.  

This is mostly ranch country with lots of those white, humped Nelore and zebu cattle. This breed came originally from India, but today breeding to adapt them to local conditions has made them essentially a Brazilian breed.  India has the world’s largest cattle herd, but Brazil has the world’s largest COMMERCIAL cattle herd, i.e. they use the cattle for meat.  It is a little ironic, IMO, given the status of these cows in their country of origin.

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Surprising Goiás

The boys and I went to Caldas Novas. There are hot springs in the area and a big artificial lake nearby. The neighboring recreational areas include a water park, called Hot Park, lots of other hotels and water-based attractions and a big man-made lake.

We drove through lots of Goiás to get there.  We went down Goiás 139 and BR 010 among others.  These are fairly small roads, so you get to see a lot of countryside. I was surprised. I thought that Goiás was like an extension of Brasilia, that it would be flat and sort of savanna. But there is a lot more different types of landscape. 

Goiás is in the middle west of Brazil and it reminds me a lot of the middle west of the U.S. There is lots of variety, flat plains, rolling country and forest covered hills. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

Above is a planted pine forest. They are now being replaced in Goiás by eucalyptus.  Below another pretty landscape.

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Burgers w/o Borders and PD Success

I would call it a public diplomacy triumph & I don’t think it is hyperbole to say so. We held “visa days” in Rio, São Paulo & Brasilia for student going to the U.S. on Science w/o Borders scholarships. There were about 600 served today.  The Brazilian government estimates that they will have sent 1500 to the U.S. by summer and more from then on thousands more.

In Brasilia, we held a big event to talk to them about the U.S. and get them ready to go to the U.S. They will be spread out all over the U.S.  

We called our event “Burgers w/o Borders.” The Ambassador and other American officers cooked and served hamburgers, American style, on a fried on a Webber grill. (I cooked too, as you can see in the picture.) Our goal was to create an American style cookout.

Always I try to learn from our successes as well as our failures and so I have been thinking about this. Getting this first wave of Brazilians to the U.S. only a few months after the Brazilian president announced the outlines of the program is a definite success. In the midst of such success, we need to determine the role of our team. How different would be the outcome if we did things differently? We don’t want to be like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise, but we also don’t want to attribute to luck what was influenced or even shaped by our efforts. You cannot learn from experience if you take credit for everything or take credit for nothing.

Results are important, but the only way to improve is to study the process that went into the results. The challenge is when we study the process already knowing how the story ended.  Knowing the outcome, we work backwards, emphasizing events that seem to have contributed to what we know happened, but may not have done so, may not be duplicable or may not be recognizable in advance. Some people say that hindsight is 20/20, but this overestimates our ability to understand the real processes and underestimates our tendencies to tell good stories and create narratives even where they don’t exist. Our stories usually overestimate deliberate actions of individuals involved, undervalue the importance of interactions among actors and neglect almost entirely the role of random events. We also tend to emphasize our own contributions. This is not only because we are egocentric, but also because information about our own actions is more readily available to us.  With those caveats in mind, I am thinking through the process.

I have written earlier about the larger program, Science w/o Borders. You can read about it here.  I won’t repeat. Let me talk here specifically about our visa days/Burgers w/o Borders, the reception we gave the students that made it an event, marked a transition, and created an impression.

First let me be open about what I think I can take credit for doing (caveats above applying).  I take credit for taking this program seriously and conveying the urgency to colleagues around Brazil.  I knew where we wanted to be. Leadership is intangible in many ways. Big successes or failures often look impossible before they happen, but then inevitable after the fact. By extension the person pushing it sometimes seems nuts before and irrelevant after. That was my role (yes – to seem nuts before & irrelevant after, and I did it well.)  I didn’t let things slip, pushed for success and let everyone know that I would back them up. W/o this leadership, I am convinced we would not have achieved this result. In the bigger picture, w/o the Mission’s consistent, proactive support, I do not believe the students would have gone this semester. We would have had a trickle in the fall semester and it would have seemed to be the natural outcome.    

“My” biggest contribution was putting the right people in the right places and letting them do what they were good at doing. I have been teaching my Brazilian colleagues the use of the word “honcho” both as a noun and a verb.  I use it in a particular fashion.  For me the honcho, or the person honchoing, does what is needed to make something work. He/she doesn’t always have specific power he/she is working with in other cases and has to enlist cooperation through a variety of persuasion and power methods. 

I asked my colleague Lana to honcho the logistics of the program at the Embassy. She did a great job of coordinating the work of others. I think it is important that the big boss (i.e. me in this case) back the honcho, but not be in charge of details. This gives the actual honcho the ability to refer to higher authority and strengthens his/her ability to implement. You would think that having the ability to make the final decision would be strength, but it is often weakness. IMO, we in State often make decisions at too high a level and/or with too much consensus. My father told me that I should never spend a dollar to make a nickel decision. The honcho can make decisions with the cover of the big boss using the resort to higher authority if there are problems (i.e. can say “I would like to do it, but you know how the boss is.”)

(It is very important that if we delegate responsibility, we also need to delegate authority for most decisions and freedom to make them. I hate it when someone gives responsibility and then comes back to second-guess or revisit all the decisions. Good leaders, IMO, add value by asking good questions and sharing experience when appropriate. Bad leaders subtract value by “taking charge” of details or “holding people accountable” while not giving them enough freedom to be responsible.  I am aware that I also suffer those faults and try tread lightly on working systems. I think of good leadership in forestry terms: know the environment; plant the right trees; thin and trim as appropriate; protect them from pests them; give them enough but not too much fertilizer to grow and let the system develop, all the time accepting that it is more complex in its details than you can understand.)

Another important “small” success was giving the program a catchy name. A project with a good name is almost always done better than one w/o one. We chose “Burgers w/o Borders” because it was a lighthearted parallel to “Science w/o Borders”.  It also had the advantage of fitting the program and the beauty of alliteration. In other words, it is easy to say; appropriate and memorable in the sense that it evokes a concrete image.

My colleagues had lots of ideas about making the event memorable in other ways. We had T-shirts and umbrellas to make the pictures memorable. Look at the picture down of the crowd with the umbrellas.  Now imagine it with just a couple people with ordinary clothes and no umbrellas. Look at my picture with the Burgers w/o Borders apron and the cowboy hat. Image makes a difference, doesn’t it?

On the day of the event, we put all hands on deck. There was some redundancy, but you need slack.  Better to have someone standing around unneeded than have someone needed not standing by.

Media was willing to cover the event because it was an event. Our press section colleagues were able to sell the it using the hook of the cookout event. They could promise good visuals and interesting stories from the student.  Of course, it didn’t hurt that Science w/o Borders had been in the news recently. A good PD rule of thumb is that you should not create your own wave when you can catch and ride higher on one that is already coming your way. People are interested in “their” events, not ours. We also encouraged the students to bring and use their cameras and cellular phones. Young people are natural creators on social media, but you need to create opportunities for them. Since Burgers w/o Borders was not in the Embassy proper, security let them keep their devices.

Of course, much of the success was created by others. Our Consular sections all over Brazil were keys to success. They were fantastically cooperative. After all, visa day required visas. As I alluded immediately above, our security folks were also very helpful and flexible. This was a case where we were lucky, lucky to have great colleagues. I really cannot “analyze” that, except to say that keeping colleagues in the loop, showing them respect and understanding their needs is essential in any cooperative endeavor, and this category includes almost all human activities. 

Of course, our Brazilian friends will see it differently. From their point of view, WE are the support activity for their program and they are right. We are supporting their success. They are right too. It is a win all around, enough to go around. 

P.S.  Students arrived on buses and had to line up to get through security.  A line is a great PR opportunity, as all politicians know. You have a captive audience eager for some diversion. I worked the line on the way in, stopping to talk to forty or fifty Brazilians on as individuals. I think this made a great impression on the students. We spoke in Portuguese outside the Embassy and then English inside to show the transition. We joked about the quality of my hamburgers and generally made the personal connection.  I think this is something they will take with them and remember for a long time.  

More pictures at the Embassy Flickr site. 

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How far can a dog run into the woods?

It is like playing an old video game where new monsters and obstacles keep on jumping up.  And just when you think you are done, you find that you have moved up to a new level, where you get to encounter a higher level of more devious monsters and more diabolical obstacles. That is how I feel dealing with getting a few hundred Science w/o Borders kids to the U.S.

President Dilma’s idea was great and historians may see it as a turning point in Brazil’s development. She decided to send 100,000 Brazilian students overseas to study in the STEM (Science, technology, engineering & math) and put the resources and willpower behind the effort. The idea is to train Brazilians for the needs of the successful and more technically advanced country Brazil has become. It is also to open Brazil to the world.  The connections that the 100,000 make will be only the beginning of long collaborations. This is the idea, a beautiful idea, but somebody has to make it so. That task fell to the Ministries of Education and of Science and Innovation. Dilma gave them only a few months to create facts on the ground. And since the first kids were supposed to go to the U.S., it became our task too. It is great opportunity, a once in a lifetime opportunity. But this is where our video game experience started.

Implementation is hard.  Sometimes leaders think it is enough to have a visionary idea, to point the way.  Of course, somebody has to point the way, but there are tough steps on the dim and narrow road to at that bright happy region of the visionary. Of course, it is the unexpected things that trip you up and that old cliché that we should expect the unexpected is just plain useless (you end up in a kind of verbal Zeno’s paradox if you really think about what that means).  The challenge is that the biggest problems are often trivial, the lack of a properly filled out form, not enough slots for the TOEFL tests etc.

My colleagues smoothed out most of these things. The biggest hero, IMO, was the Fulbright Commission, but lots of people’s efforts were necessary, if sometimes not sufficient to get the job done. Many people did their parts when they needed to. I know of many, and I am sure there are others about which I am just unaware, deal busting dilemmas anticipated and overcome.

Our last challenge came this morning and for a while I thought it would finish us off.  IIE told us that we would not have the necessary visa forms for our visa day (when our Brazilian students would all show up at the Embassy and Consulates for their visas and briefings).  In the video game metaphor, this would be meeting the master villain on the last level before you “win”.  I thought it was “game over”. Fortunately, our Fulbright Director prevailed on IIE to send a person with the documents on a plane on Saturday.  I am again optimistic. This is still cutting it close and we are not out of the woods yet.

There is no going back for us and I believe we are coming out.  If we get the visas and briefings out of the way, our work is done – at least until next time.   We (and I speak broadly here to include all our partners, Brazilian & American) will have done what many said couldn’t be done, found, funded, placed, credentialed and deployed the first 600+ students to be followed by thousands more.  The initial condition sets the tone and this initial echelon is good.  We can bask in our glory for a few days, understanding full well that once it is done, everybody will think it was easy and inevitable.   Assuming it gets done.  Those chicks are not yet hatched. 

How far can a dog run into the woods?  He can run in only half way. After that he is running out. 

My picture is from another of our programs. We sponsor English teachers going to the U.S. on a scholarship. Two of the teachers are going to JMU.  I included the picture because it is in the general subject area – English teaching is one of those obstacles we are addressing – but it is here mostly because of the colors. The American and Brazilian flags are beautiful together, aren’t they? Surely there is a lesson there.

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State Delegations

We have been getting lots of visitors in Brazil. They have to come now, since much activity shut down for the holidays a couple of weeks from now and will not really recommence until after Carnival.  

The most interesting for me was a visit by a delegation from the State of Massachusetts led by Governor Deval Patrick.  Most of the delegation consisted of business people representing high-tech and life-science firms, but there were also representatives of Massachusetts’ universities.  We were happy to see them, since they fit in well with our support for the Ciência sem Fronteiras project.  The universities reps said that they were interested in taking Brazilian students and the Brazilians are interested in going to Massachusetts, so it looks like we have the beginnings of a beautiful friendship.  

Massachusetts is a case study in the value of education. The state has gone through good times and hard times, but it always adapts.  The high levels of education make this much easier.  I gave a short presentation to the group and they were pleased when I called their home a “state of brains” but I was not trying to flatter.  Massachusetts has long been one of the case studies I use when talking about renewal, resilience and the crucial role that education plays in easing transitions.   

Nobody can predict the future with any certainty.  The best plans and most elegant adaptions to current conditions will someday become useless and maybe even dysfunctional when technologies, trade patterns or other relationships change.  Education cannot protect you from change, but it can help you identify trends and develop options to deal with them.  

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Habits of the Heart

We had an interesting lunch with CCBEU staff.  Among other things, we talked about the culture of responsibility. It is a common complain among Brazilians that people here expect too much from the government and that the government delivers much too little. Everybody mentions the various corruption scandals that seem to surface with monotonous regularity. I was able to give a little favorable perspective. The Brazil I found when I returned after almost twenty-five years was better in almost every way than the one I left in 1988, I told them. Problems remain, of course. But they are not uniquely Brazilian and, IMO, many can be traced to expectations mentioned above.

I mentioned the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Any American who has seriously studied our history is familiar with Tocqueville, but his fame doesn’t seem to cross our borders. I explained that Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who wrote about democracy in America in the 1830s. We Americans take lots of what he wrote as compliments; he didn’t always mean it that way. In the America that Tocqueville described, hard work, enterprise and money-making are the rule. Americans, he noted, do not defer to elites, as they still did in Europe. This included, to Tocqueville’s distress, not deferring even to those of “superior talent and intelligence.” America was a dynamic, although maybe a rude place. But the America was more exceptional in the amount of local and personal initiative.

In the Old World, citizens petitioned their government to do things for them. After that they waited for it to happen and complained when it wasn’t done right. Tocqueville observed that in America many of these “government” tasks were taken up by individuals in voluntary, often temporary, association. We formed task forces and committees to address local problems, bringing in government as last resort and even then resorting to government at the lowest level possible. In France at the time, power to make decisions about local roads or building codes would migrate to Paris and the choices made there. In America, they were often not made by government at all and when government was necessary, it was usually the local officials who called the shots.

American tradition of working through voluntary associations has persisted to this day. One of our colleagues said that this is what surprised him when he was on an exchange in the U.S. He gave the example of his host family and all the neighbors getting together to do the dirty work, literally shoveling manure, in the barns at the Indiana State Fair. In most other countries, this just doesn’t happen. At best, people might give money to hire somebody to do it.

I pointed out that government in the U.S. has plenty of problems and petty corruption, but one reason why it has historically been more responsive to the people is that we, the people, ask it to do less. Tocqueville warned of a “soft despotism” in democracies, where citizens vote for politicians who promise to give them things. When people have the habit (Tocqueville called them “habits of the heart”) to do things for themselves in voluntary association with their fellow citizens, it preempts the necessity of government intervention and also preempts the creation of a network of petty rules and regulations that are the bane of existence in the more bureaucratic states. Soft despotism is ameliorated if those voting benefits have to pay for them and even more so if they have to work in their creations.

My life in other countries has, IMO, helped me see America in a more objective way and I think there has been a convergence in the last quarter century. People in many other countries have become somewhat more active in doing things in voluntary association rather than waiting or demanding government action.  I am certainly seeing that in Brazil. On the other hand, America has become more bureaucratized. Government has reached into voluntary associations in ways it did not before, establishing rules and standards that seem to make sense but end up crippling the voluntary impulse.

I read about a recent (Thanksgiving) example where the authorities in New Jersey have imposed various regulations on church-run soup kitchens. People can no longer bring food from home to donate and there are stricter rules on facilities and reporting requirements that will cost more than $150,000.00 a year. You can argue that such regulations are good, but they will have two effects. They will take it out of the hands of people and make another activity the responsibility of the government. In short order, costs will rise. The people who used to get satisfaction from carry out their responsibly as good citizens will resent the taxes and the recipients will get less and lower quality food.

Lawyers are also getting involved. People engaged in voluntary activities are now advised to get liability insurance. We are managing to make good citizenship costly and hazardous to your financial future. When you make things harder or more expensive, you get less of them.

America really was exceptional in the number of things we did voluntarily. Authorities are/were not always welcoming. I recall reading a biography of Ben Franklin, who was the godfather of many good citizenship practices. The local representatives of the king did not always welcome his self-help plans. They considered them subversive and they were right. When people can do things for themselves they become less dependent on the beneficence and largess of the state.

I am glad to see that people in many places around the world are seeing the benefit of acting outside both governmental and the strictly private spheres. People working together in voluntary association is the essence of community. We don’t make friends face-to-face; we make them shoulder-to-shoulder working on common goals. I think it is healthy that they are becoming more like us, even if that means American is less “exceptional”. But I am not healthy that we are becoming less like we were.

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A City of Aspiration

Goiania is what demographer Joel Kotkin would call a city of aspiration, a place where people go to enjoy upward mobility and live the kind of life they dreamed about. I have written about this subject before. It is a heartland city that grew from the soil of Goiás. Most of the people who live there are from the city itself or from the area of Goiás, there has not been large scale immigration to Goiania from other regions of Brazil. Goiania is only around seventy-five years old. It was a planned city, but it grew well beyond the projection. The plan was for 80,000 people; there are now a million and a half.

The picture up top is a good representation of the way the city has grown out of the cerrado. There is not much around and suddenly the city. I took the picture from the Federal University. They told me that the university was built outside town and it is still outside, but the city is creeping up.

You can see the growing city behind me in the second picture. The guy from the BNC told me that this area was mostly undeveloped when he was a young man about twenty years ago. Now there are lots of restaurants and shops. The park in the foreground, called Vaca Brava or angry cow, was just a field and that lake was just a stream with some wetlands around it. The actual name is O Parque Sulivan Silvestre. Vaca Brava comes from the name of one of the ranches that used to occupy the place. Who knows whether or not the eponymous angry cow really existed?  

The BNC is across the street from the Vaca Brava Park.  That was our first stop of the day. They have around 3500 students. They also do educational advising and cultural programs.  The Ciência sem Fronteiras program has significantly increased the workload for the advising center. Not only are more people coming in for advice but they are doing a booming business in translating school transcripts.  The demand for TOEFL (English as a foreign language) tests is exceeding supply. 

Most Brazilian students have not taken the TOEFL; it was a much slower business before Dilma’s program came on.  They are trying to increase the number of TOEFL tests available, but there are challenges.  ETS doesn’t compensate test centers very much, so it is hard to get space. Some students have to make long trips just to take the test and it is not cheap. It costs about $R300, which is big money to some people.  At the BNC and at both the Federal University and PUC they complained about the TOEFL, so I figure it must be a valid problem.  Unfortunately, the test is an unavoidable step on the way to U.S. schools. 

I later spoke with people from CAPES and Fulbright who told me that many students who would have gone to the U.S. to study in January were postponed for want to TOEFL. 

English teaching in Brazil as changed, first of all because demand has spiked. Ciência sem Fronteiras has accelerated the trend, but it existed before.  But another reason is that there has also been an inversion in ability, probably because of TV and Internet. It used to be that the older students were the more advanced.  It made sense, since they were in longer. Now, however, the younger kids are the ones leading the way. The teachers mentioned that they sometimes feel sorry for older students, who have a harder time and seem to have just missed the boat on the enhanced English exposure. 

We saw a couple of pilots who were learning English. They need English for their jobs and there is evidently a small but important job market for pilots to fly down private planes purchased in the U.S. by Brazilians.   The BNC, however, does not teach specialized English for pilots or other professionals. The demand is not sufficient and they lack teachers with the specialized skills.