Category: Brazil

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The Poet

I visited the Poet today. I guess the call him THE Poet, using the definite article and implicitly capitalizing the P because he is the only one in the area.

He is not one of those dour poets. No, this guy is bright, cheerful and open.  He celebrates nature and nature’s bounty and lives in and of nature. 

He showed me all the plants near his house that have health or medicinal qualities.  I don’t know about that. I have never been much of a believer in natures pharmacopeia. I understand that most of our medicines have precursors in the untamed environment, but the refined forms are more useful and predictable.  He looked healthy, however and his explanations were interesting and plausible, as he showed me around his little green domain. One of the trees had a sticky sap that you could use as insect repellent. Another had leaves that were rough and could be used to clean your dishes. There were plants good for digestion and some that didn’t do anything but look pretty. The man certainly had given it a lot of thought, and it sounded really good what he said.  But I kept in mind that they call him “the poet” and the “the physician” probably for a reason. 

The Poet has a Facebook page and they made a movie about him.  I thought it was a little anomalous that he would be pecking away at a computer in the midst of nature.  After all, a guy who eats leaves when he has a headache instead of taking aspirin doesn’t seem like the computer nerd type and he isn’t. His daughter, who lives in town does the social media work.

Meeting the Poet made me a happier man. I do not want to emulate his lifestyle. I like to be in the woods, but I also like to eat stuff from the supermarket (i.e. processed foods) and have … all the comforts of my home. I am just not that organic. But I am content that someone can still live Thoreau-like in our modern world.  The Poet lives life deliberately. He notices and celebrates the nature around him, yet he also is open to people and rejoicing of humanity. (BTW – Thoreau didn’t really live in the wilderness either. He could walk to his friends’ houses. It was sort of like camping out in Rock Creek Park or Central Park.) They should make a movie about him … I guess they did.

He also has a YouTube video.

My pictures show the Poet & me. Below is the meal he provided. I understand that many people like shrimp and I was grateful for the bounty & I understand that the Poet or one of his friends actually catch the shrimp.

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Saying the Words of Others

I was one of the opening speakers at conference on black entrepreneurism in Salvador that I talked about in my last post.  It is part of our program on encouraging racial equality in both Brazil and the U.S.  You can read about it at this link.

This is part of my ceremonial diplomatic duties and the part of communications that I am less good at.  I am good at the extemporaneous talks and persuasion, but I have a real problem actually reading a speech.  I always want to skip ahead and I tend to accelerate as I am reading. I could make the excuse that I have to read it in Portuguese but the concern is not valid.  If I have to read a speech and say all the words (as opposed to the free form) I think I actually prefer to do it in Portuguese. It is easier for me to read slowly in my non-native language. I worked with the language coach yesterday to get the pronunciation better.

I have been practicing this entire career and still feel like a freshman when I get in front of a crowd. Nevertheless, in the last couple of years I think I have finally gotten a bit better at this type of performance precisely because I now understand that it is indeed a performance.  They don’t come to see me; they come to see a representative of the United States of America. I am expected to play a role and I do that. When giving a set speech, originality and knowledge are not virtues. I didn’t write the speech. I am there to convey the policy produced by others and it is much more important to be true to that than to add my own spin. My job is to wear a nice suit, smile at the appropriate time, read the words right and modulate the sounds so that at least some members of the audience enjoy the experience. I 

I have to fight the feeling that I am a fraud for not producing my own material.  This is where the recognition that it is a performance has helped a lot. The higher you get in the organization, the more you are called on to perform the ceremonial task using words prepared by others.

Speaking of others, my picture shows one of the other participants. I don’t have a picture of myself, and he is better looking anyway. 

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Using Big Sporting Events to Encourage Inclusion

I met former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin at breakfast. She told me that she was the sewer mayor, since it was during her tenure that Atlanta’s antiqued sewer and water systems were renewed and she had managed to push through rate hikes. I  liked her immediately. I have been reading a book called “The Big Thirst” about the challenges of providing clean water in the 21st Century. Actually getting water projects done is one of the biggest challenges for any elected official. The pipes are usually underground, where nobody can see them. The costs of addressing the problem are usually obvious and up-front, while the benefits come later and will be taken for granted when they come. I love any politician with the courage & persistence to tackle this problem.

Ms Franklin came to speak for us at a conference on how to leverage big sporting events to help be more inclusive of all members of society and create sustainable economic benefits.  The actual title is “Promoting Entrepreneurship and Racial Inclusion within the Context of the Mega Sports Events”

She brought experience from Atlanta’s successful Olympic games. Brazil will host the World Cup of Football in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016, so this experience will be useful.

She also brought a report with her, a lessons learned from Atlanta written in 1996. The Brazilians were delighted to get their copies, but Ms. Franklin told us that nobody had asked for it before. I guess it is just hard to learn lessons.  The old saying of George Santayana comes to mind, the one about no remembering history and being doomed to repeat it.  Or maybe it is just that we want to reinvent the wheel each time have have a big event.  Maybe this time, at least, experience will be helpful. 

The idea is to use the big money and international attention brought by big sporting events to help the local society.  Too often, sports are really a money loser for the community.  Everybody loves them, but the costs of the stadiums and related infrastructure is not actually recouped, much less used for profit. Atlanta was one of the few venues that ended in positive financial territory.  That alone is an accomplishment rarely equaled and never exceeded. But there is more.

As Shirley Franklin explained, Atlanta used the  games to help the community. They made sure that people were trained to to the work that needed to be done and that these skills could be used after the closing ceremonies and the excitement of the games was just reflected on old sports archives. This is an achievement worth emulating.   I hope our Brazilian friends can take advantage of this.   I think they will.

My picture shows her being interviewed by local TV.

I will post a copy of the report when I get the PDF. 

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What Can 100,000 Smart Kids Accomplish?

I chaired my first Fulbright Commission meeting. This is a great honor & I won’t deny that I take some joy in bragging about it here, even if I didn’t do anything in particular to earn the honor. I take the responsibly seriously and I took the Fulbright course from FSI distance learning so I understand the history and the process. Ours is a binational commission, which means that the Brazilian side shares in the decision making and funding. It is a great asset to our two countries and to the world, since such encouragement of scholarship is good for everybody. 

Besides the usual business, we talked about Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s aspiration to send 100,000 Brazilians overseas to study in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Math & Engineering). We all have been thinking about that and the all the world’s universities have been beating a path to Brazil to try to get a piece of this action, especially since the Brazilians will fund the studies. Fortunately for us, President Dilma has said, and repeated on many occasions, that she wants at least half of the students to go to the U.S.  Today there are only around 9000 Brazilians studying in the U.S. Multiplying that by five will be a challenge.  

Our interests and those of our Brazilian friends correspond almost perfectly, but so do some of the challenges. Brazil is a big country like the United States and Brazilians, like Americans, are not among the most polyglot people of the world. Americans are lucky; our English, is the international language of business, science, education & entertainment. Brazilian leaders recognize that more Brazilians will need to know English at a higher level if the country is to continue to thrive in the wider world. Weak English will be one of the challenges in sending 100,000 Brazilians to studies overseas. It is not only in the U.S., the UK or Australia that English is necessary. Many Brazilians bound for places like China, India, Germany and even France will study mostly in English.   

English and Education are priorities of ours too. One of my goals is to make it easier for Brazilians to study in the U.S. I understand that just pushing harder to get more young people interested in the U.S. is not the answer. We need to smooth the path and remove obstacles. A problem with English proficiency, and the knowledge that goes with it, is the biggest hurdle, or at least the one we can most readily address. 

Fortunately, we have some solutions. I have written on several occasions about our BNCs. They already reach thousands of Brazilians and often exactly young people who might want to study in the U.S. So we are working with the union of BNCs to develop a course that would include intensive English plus acculturation to U.S. university culture. We would do this in cooperation with our EducationUSA colleagues. The courses would help in general with English and specifically with the TOEFL test of English proficiency. 

I don’t fool myself into believing that our efforts will determine the future of 190 million Brazilians, but I am certain that we will positively affect the lives of thousands of young Brazilian, enrich the lives of thousands of Americans who will become their friends & help American universities. This is no small thing.

The Brazilian aspiration is beautiful. As an American I feel proud that so many choose the U.S and American universities as their destination.  

As I have written before, we have been working in Brazil for generations (Fulbright has been here since 1957). We have structures in place that facilitate educational exchanges. Beyond that, the American nation is greater than the American government, and American universities, NGO and others have also been active. But our network has been carrying a relatively small number of mostly high level student and professors. What our Brazilian friends imagine now is a much bigger number with participants from all parts of Brazilian society. I think of this like the streets of São Paulo. The network is designed for a much lower level of traffic.  We need to figure out ways to make it work better.

My picture is left over from my recent visit home. It shows the book fair on the Mall in Washington.  

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September 11 Ten Years Later in Ceilândia

Right after the 9/11 attacks, the students at School #8 in Ceilândia made an American flag representing their feelings and sympathy toward Americans. It was a beautiful and moving gesture and several generations of Foreign Service Officers and Brazilian colleagues have kept the flag over the last ten years and kept the memory of how it was made and presented.

We reconnected today; this time we went to the school in Ceilândia where we met the new generations of school and a few of the original kids, now young adults.  I admit that it was a good media event with great visuals.  We got coverage on radio, TV & in newspapers.  But I think it was also a good way to pay back, or maybe pay forward, friendship and sympathy expressed a decade ago at a time when we really needed friends. 

The kids were very friendly and funny. They liked to hear us speaking English, even though they couldn’t understand it.  Some asked what their names would be in “American,” but names don’t really change.  One little girl very seriously promised that if we came back next year, she would speak to us in English.   It was hard to understand their questions and I have to admit that I am not really very good at talking to little kids in any language, but I tried with limited success.  When they asked me about my favorite team, I told them Corinthians, because that is the team that came quickest to mind. I found immediately out that their favorite team is Flamengo.  Who knew? Flamengo is based in Rio de Janeiro.  I also learned that the team recently signed a very good player called Ronaldinho Gaúcho & that Flamengo is not named after the birds with a similar name. You can learn a few things from little kids. Next time somebody asks me about my favorite team, I can say Flamengo and reference Ronaldinho. I will be okay as long as nobody asks any follow-up questions. I always wanted to know more about spectator sports, but I just don’t care.  I am the opposite of most guys. I watch the news every night, but my attention drifts when the sports comes on.  I think I will master a few more facts about football, however.

BTW – Ceilândia is one of Brasilia’s satellite cities. It grew up out of an informal occupation by people who worked in Brasilia but couldn’t afford homes there. Even the name of the city reflects this.  The CEI comes from Centro de Erradicação de Invasões, which means center of eradication of invasions; in this case the term “invasions” refers to irregular occupations of land near the capital.

My colleagues did a very good job. The visit to School #8 in Ceilândia was the last event in our 9/11 campaign themed on resilience “Superação”. The webpage is here. Our social media got around 170,000 comments and probably around a million visitors.  We also got good coverage on TV and in newspapers. My colleagues also made a good video to go with the visit in Ceilândia. We sponsored graffiti artists to paint a couple of walls at the school. You can see it being done on the video.  

The pictures show the kids at the celebration. Below is a newspaper article reporting on the event. The last picture is an interesting juxtaposition of the Brazilian symbol of Christ that stands above Rio with the Statue of Liberty. We didn’t make it. It is a little corny, but the thought is nice.

Please look at our videos here & here.  IMO, they are very good.  The one shows how art overcomes the gang markings. The other shows the story of the Brazilian kids and the flag.

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Odds & Ends of Chapada dos Veadeiros

Above and below are wasp nests. They look just like rocks, mabye the kinds of rocks they would have on a moive set. I couldn’t find information about them on Internet, so I only have what the guide told me.  I did tap on the surface and it was light weight and hollow. The guide said that they were sting-less. I didn’t actually see any bees or wasps.

Below is our guide. He said he was a native of the area and did this every day.

Below is the pousada where we stayed. It is called “Bambu” and there is lots of bamboo used around it.The place is clearly the dream of the owner. It contains lots of personalized touches and I suppose could be called either full or personality or funky. We liked it.

Below is a Coca-Cola truck on Sao Jorge street. I don’t want to go where there’s not Coca-Cola, but I doubt such a place exists anymore. 

Below is Goias Hwy 118. Not a bad road.

Below is just a cool looking plant. I have no idea what it is. 

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A Dry Smokey Season

You rarely think about the air you breathe. We talk vaguely about air quality, but very rarely anymore is our air bad enough that most people change their behaviors. Even when we get those warnings about air quality, it is not that bad. It wasn’t always like that. I remember in the early 1970s in Milwaukee when I could tell where I was in the city by the particular sorts of pollution: yeasty smells near the breweries, a sweet smell near the Ambrosia chocolate factory and a horrible stink that would knock a buzzard off a sh*t wagon near the tanneries. You didn’t need to hear a report on the radio that air was bad and that you should limit your activities. The air itself told you and forced you to change.

The air has gotten a lot cleaner, at least in most of the places I have lived. I have not seen much of anything you could really call serious widespread air pollution, in the old style, in the U.S. in many years. Poland was very bad when we got to Krakow.  As they closed down the communist era pollution factories, things improved rapidly, but you still had to consider the air quality in your running or biking plans.  

I have been noticing the air again here in Brasilia. I wrote a little about the fires during the dry season a few posts ago. It is bad.  The smoke hurts your eyes, throat and lungs and it just smells bad.  Last night I used the air conditioner for the first time, not to cool the house – you don’t really need to do that in Brasilia – but rather to try to filter the air a little. It didn’t work.

The smoke problem follows the clock. It is not so bad during the day when the smoke rises easily and disperses, but the cooler and calmer conditions of the evening seem to hold it closer to the ground. This is only my observation and I do not vouch for the scientific veracity. It could also be that people are setting fires in the evening or maybe the cooler temperatures make the fires less intense and less intense fires smolder more.  I don’t know. All that I know is that the smell and smoke at night are bad, but it clears up fairly well during the day. The rains will come in a few weeks. Until then, the expectation is that it will not improve and will get worse.

Brasilia in general is a great place to live. I suppose we can tolerate a smoke season and I think it could reasonably be called a season, since it evidently happens every year with monotonous regularity. There is lots of speculation about how the smoke moves. Some people say that during the night the smoke hangs in the basin of the lake, which would help explain the problem in my particular area. 

I will be happy to see the rain and not only to stop the fires. I look forward to the green and the rainbows.  I prefer the rainy season.

PS – I took Chrissy to the airport for her flight back. The air was not too bad until I got back near the lake at my house. I think that I indeed to have an unlucky smokey spot. In additon, I bought a local paper that talked about the fires. The national park is burning.  Chrissy and I noticed four engine prop planes flying over the house. I found out from the paper that it was a fire fighting plane.

The pictures have nothing to do with smoke. They are just some of the neighbors in my back yard. The monkeys are about the size of cats and seem to move like squirrels. I don’t see them too often. The parrots seem to have just arrived. They don’t talk; they just make unpleasant squawking sounds. They seem to be threatening each other or other birds. 

The last picture is just me swimming in the pool at Chapada dos Veadeiros.  I didn’t have any other place for it and it was nice to feature cool water in the dry season post. Those pools are deep. I could not hit bottom there.

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Chapada dos Veadeiros

Chrissy & I went for a hike in Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park.  You are required to have a guide, which is used to keep the numbers in the park low and keep them on the straight and narrow trails.  The park is at an ecological intersection cerrado grassland a savannah and tropical forest.  It is not the tropical rain forest, however.  This forest is semi-deciduous. Many of the trees drop their leaves during the dry season.  

Chapada dos Veadeiros encompasses many of the headwaters of the Tocantins River, which is reason enough to protect the area. It also contains, according to the signs, a great deal of biodiversity. I don’t recognize the tree of plant species. I found a good webpage at this link and hope to learn more.  I am also still trying to get a feel for the cerrado.  

Above & below show Chapada dos Veadeiros landscapes.  Palm trees follow water courses, above or below ground.

Below shows the fish that are common in pools among the rocks.

Below – people swim in the clear pools. I did too. The guy in the photo jumped from the cliff. I did not. 

Below shows Chrissy and me in the park.

Below is one of the canyons and streams in Chapada dos Veadieros.

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Northern Goiás

We drove up Goiás 118 to Chapada dos Veadeiros national park. It took about four hours and it was interesting to see the changes in landscapes.  Leaving Brasilia you see the typical planalto landscapes. There are plantations of eucalyptus and pine. The pine is on the way out. I saw lots of young eucalyptus plantations, but the pines are all older, usually past prime. This makes me a little sad; I like the pines, but I understand that eucalyptus is just a superb producer of fiber in this climate. Nothing can compete with it, economically or biologically. Eucalyptus plantations are so neat because the eucalyptus tannins inhibit the growth of anything else.

As you get farther in to Goiás, you come up on forty miles of bad road and almost no people. It is surprising how empty this land is still. I drove through Kansas, Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle  a years back. This reminds me of some of those places.  Imperfectly, of course, since Goiás features palm trees and other vegetation not typical of the American plains. American roads are also better and there are more signs of human habitation. I think this has to do as much with settlement patterns as actual population. Brazilians tend to live in concentrations, while Americans spread out on their own farms or in suburbs.

The land changed abruptly and became hillier and greener as we got closer to the chapada. Maybe I should stop making the analogies, since it doesn’t really look like any of my familiar landscapes. The cerrado is its own sort of landscape.

Our destination for the day was São Jorge. It is literally the end of the road, actually PAST the end of the road. You drive down a decent paved road, which end abruptly. Twelve kilometers down the dirt road is São Jorge. I found this really fascinating.  It is an active village. People are walking around and there are several pousadas and restaurants of sorts, but no paved streets. I have been here before.  I mean, it is like many of the towns at the gates of national parks. In America they have paved streets, but the feeling is the same. People work in the hospitality industry or in outdoor occupations such as guides, forestry workers or rangers.  These places also attract alternative lifestyle types.  In São Jorge there are shops that sell crystals etc. that are supposed to have some kinds of special powers, kind of like you might find in Sadona. People respond in similar fashion to similar environments.

The top picture is another of those eucalyptus plantations. Farther down is a pine plantation. The pines are way too close and should be thinned, but I don’t think this forest is being used for forestry. It is decorative. Still, it should be thinned. The picture between is at a gas station on GO118. Below that is a main street in Sao Jorge. The bottom picture is the dirt road that leads to and past Sao Jorge. What looks like smoke is dust. A car was coming but I didn’t get a good picture.  

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Where There’s Fire, There’s Smoke

I don’t mind the dry air, but the smoke is starting to get difficult.  The rains will come in a few weeks.  Until then, this is not the best time to be in Brasilia.

I am not unsympathetic to using fire as a management tool. I understand that it is crucial to the cerrado ecosystem. But most of the fires set around here are not good management. They are either too hot and destroy too much or not well done so as to be ineffective. Most of the fires, in fact, seem to be garbage fires that got out of hand and/or much of the smoke comes from actual garbage fires, which do nobody any good. Using fire as a tool is not the same as using it as a convenience.

We saw lots of fires on our way up to Chapada dos Veadeiros and you can see the effects of fire in the national park.  The rocks are black. The guide said that they get a natural black patina and that it is not the result of fires.  I don’t believe that.  I know that the guide has been there all his life and I don’t want to oppose his local knowledge, but it is probably true that this place has been burned over all that time. I remember the black “cream city brick” in Milwaukee. Cream city brick is a kind of yellowish white color in its natural form, but the porous nature of the brick surface turned it black when exposed to the constant coal smoke. Not all brick was equally blackened.  When the air was cleaned up in the 1970s, the cream city brick again looked creamy.  I think the same thing happens to these black rocks. They soak up the carbon black and never get clean. Different sorts of rocks absorb more than others, as in the rocks above.  

“Natural” fires would have been rare, since lightning to start those fires would tend to come with thunderstorms during the wet season, which would limit their extent. But with the arrival of man many thousands of years ago, fires during the dry season changed the landscapes. Native Brazilians set fires, just as native North Americans and there has not been a “natural” landscape here since.

I learned in my fire class (I am certified as a fire manager by the State of Virginia) that fires that are too hot or too frequent destroy natural diversity, since only a few species can take the stress.  On the other hand, places where fire never comes also lose diversity, since a few species come to dominate. I wrote a post about how fires work at this link. A proper fire regime produces greater variety and a robust ecosystem. The problem is knowing how much is enough and how much is too much.  It also requires setting priorities.  Land managers must make choices, which some a loath to do.  They want to default to the “natural” option. Unfortunately, there is no natural option, only a variety of different choices for human management. Do we take it back to 1500?  The landscape at that time was already altered by the native populations. Do we guess at what it must have been before humans? Of course, we cannot restore all the species.  Or do we manage for diversity, productivity and robustness?  This would be my option.  

Anyway, fire can be used well or poorly. All fire will produce smoke, but there are better ways of smoke management. A well designed fire will consume much of its own smoke and will not smolder for a very long time.

The picture at top is a fire by the side of Goias 118. I don’t think it was a “managed” fire, but you can see by the direction of the flames that it is a backing fire, i.e. it is burning in the direction away from the wind. This produces a cooler fire, not as destructive to the plant life. I wrote a post about this when I was taking the fire class. It is at this link.  You can see the burned over area in the side mirror. Next picture shows some fields on fire. The blackish rocks are below. The plants in the next picture are burned but not killed. Last is a typical Goias landscape as you get near the hills.