Tag: foreign service

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The Goal of the Process is the Process

I watched “Remember the Titans” today. The story is a common one, retold since the time of Homer or Gilgamesh.  Different people, maybe even enemies, come together to achieve a common goal and in the process of working toward the goal they become a team.  They learn to respect each other by working together. Winning the championship is not the story; becoming a team is the real theme and long-lasting mutual respect is the long-term outcome.  

A successful public diplomacy program is like that. We don’t win friends in the long run by always being right or by convincing people of the righteousness of our cause; we win friends by working together on a common cause.  And the process of doing the task is often more useful than the final outcome. Creating a process IS the goal if your purpose is to make friends for the long run. The key to finding joy in this endeavor is to find a worthy common purpose that will absorb the energies of the participants and capture their imaginations.   I mentioned our school principal exchange before. I didn’t know a thing about it a few months ago, but I love this program.  It takes top-performing Brazilian public school principals and sends them to the U.S. where they work with American counterparts for three weeks. Then they come back to Brazil to report on their experiences to their Departments of Education and their colleagues.  They hold their big conference in a different city each year.  It will be in Recife this time on November 5.This year we will have representatives of twenty-four of the twenty-six Brazilian states. They usually do not come from the biggest cities in Brazil and they do not go to the biggest cities in the U.S.  It is a heartland –to-heartland exchange as well as a heart-to-heart emotion.  Next summer, after keeping in contact over the intervening months, the American principals will come to Brazil. I wrote a little about the principal exchange in an earlier post. This is a great process in  and of itself and if we achieved the goal of bringing the principals together I would consider it a grand success. It puts Americans and Brazilians in a common quest to improve public education in our two countries.  But it is even deeper than that.  The Brazilians and the American institutions involved take the selection process very seriously. Dozens of Brazilian principals vie for each opening. Thousands of people are involved and I believe they are improved by it.  

Our youth ambassador exchange is celebrating its tenth anniversary next year and it keeps on getting better.  It started out when then U.S. Ambassador Donna Hrinak wanted to do something to reach a youth audience in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.  Our PA section came up with the idea of sending twelve ordinary young people from public high schools to the U.S.  It was a modest start and it is still not a program that reaches masses of people, but it has grown.  Now we send thirty-five and work with 7500 students. And again the process is what touches most people.

This year we got around 7500 applicants, as I mentioned above. All speak English and are good students. They apply through sixty-four of our partner organizations throughout Brazil, all of Brazil including little towns in places like Acre or Rondonia, where we can rarely tread.  This partnership is valuable. They are BNCs, education departments and schools, all of which are willing to devote many hours of their people’s time to the service of what they consider a worthy cause.  Everybody is a volunteer and they do it for the love of learning and the future of their country.  In the process we build friendships.

The applicants write essays about American topics – in English, which are judged by boards that include university professors, teachers and BNC officials. They narrow the field to 180 finalists. After that a board in Brasilia made up of our CAO, our lead Brazilian employee plus some other people from consulates in Brazil. Thirty-five get a scholarship to visit the U.S.  This year, since it is the tenth anniversary, we want to send “plus ten” or forty-five. We are looking for corporate sponsors for this addition, which is another opportunity for partnership.

All the finalists get something. Those not chosen as youth ambassadors get a week of English immersion at one of Brazil’s great BNCs.  I wrote about the last time  here and here.

The lucky winners go to the U.S.   During their first visit in 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell took the time to meet with the group. He spent more than a half hour with them, which is a lot of time for a busy guy like him at that time.  Subsequently, they have met other Secretaries of State plus people like Laura Bush and Michelle Obama.  It is a class act.

We always get a lot of great press in Brazil, which magnifies the reach of an already great program.  This year we believe we will get the winners announced on one of Brazil’s most popular TV variety programs.  It will reach millions of Brazilians with the kind of excitement generated by American Idol. I am not at liberty to reveal details now, since we are still in negotiations, but I am reasonably certain that we will make a big noise o/a October 22.   So this is a great program in terms of tangible PR results, as is the principal exchange. We get press and we get noticed.  By I return to what I consider more important, the lasting relationships. We have friends all over Brazil who have worked with us on these programs and recall our common success.  Long after the newspapers have composted and the television glamor has faded, these relationships abide.

My pictures show the city of Sao Paulo from the offices of the Lemann Foundation and the SP State Ministry of Education. 

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Youth Audiences: Simple, not Always Easy

Reaching youth audiences in a meaningful way is a perennial challenge for public diplomacy. We sometimes pander to them, trying to supply vacuous messages in a pathetic attempt to be cool. I don’t like this. We (USG) are not cool in the adolescent way and I don’t want us to be. But I think we already have nearly perfect vehicles for sustained contact with youth. We may not appreciate them because we have been using them for a long time but we have not been using them in the same old ways.

I wrote a note about our BNCs earlier here & here.  So far, I have visited BNCs in Rio, Recife, São Paulo and Manaus and that has made me more certain than before that this is a great vehicle. We reach thousands of young people with almost no direct cost to the U.S. taxpayers.  BNCs have also played parts in a couple other great programs, that I will describe below. It is the synergy that we are always seeking. 

For example, one reason I went to Recife and Manaus last week was to follow up on participants in our youth ambassador program.  Young Brazilians went to the U.S. a few months ago.  Most of the winners were chosen with the help of the BNCs. The BNCs also did follow up programs with runners-up, as I described in an earlier post here & here.  Now they are hosting Americans coming to Brazil as the counterpart of the program. It is a great experience for the young Americans, but it is even more important to the young Brazilians they meet.  The program lets us reach all parts of Brazil.  Each of the youth Ambassadors personally interacts with hundreds of Brazilians. Through social media and traditional media (they are interviewed in newspapers, radio and TV) they reach even more.  One reason this is so effective is that they are in smaller centers too. An official American is a bigger deal in Manaus than in São Paulo and an even bigger deal in Rio Branco or Boa Vista.

In Manaus, I had planned to meet the four American youth Ambassadors who went there. So I invited them to a meeting.  I had not counted on all their new Brazilian friends and former Brazilian youth Ambassadors. I ended up with twenty kids at Pizza Hut, excitedly talking about America with me and with each other. They want to know about … everything.  They commented that they couldn’t believe that American diplomats could be so open and eat so much pizza. They had a image of us with three-piece suits. The Pizza Hut encounter changed their minds. I am not saying that twenty kids will change the world, or our image here, but, as I wrote above, they talk.  It was touching that they worried about spending my money and wanted to chip in for the check.  It cost about $R20 a person. We can afford that and it was money well spend. I think I will try to regularize these kinds of meetings with young people. I used to do it a lot in Poland and it worked well.  Kids everywhere like pizza. Me too.

The other program I have been following around is the Brazil-U.S. Principal Exchange Program. This one takes the best principal from Brazil and sends them to work with schools in the U.S.  It is followed by some of the best American principals who come to Brazil.  Each group studies the work of the others and suggests exchanges of best practices. These educators go to places where Americans are less common, like Acre, Tocantins, Mato Grosso or Rondonia. They reach thousands personally and maybe millions through the media.

I spent the morning in Manaus with the principal that went to Amazonas & Acre.  Her name was Sandra Boyles and she was a principal in the State of Georgia.  She made her report to the State Secretary of Education in Amazonas at a big assembly of school leaders from throughout the state. They met us – literally – with a band and a choir. 

I talked to the Secretary of Education Gedeão Timóteo Amorim during lunch that followed the program.  I have rarely found anybody so satisfied with one of our programs. He said that he had spoken with the principals that went from Amazonas and that his staff had lots of ideas for following up.  In fact, our current good situation is a partial follow up to an even to an earlier program. This guy was an IVP. He told me that he got many ideas about distance educations during his official visit to the United States.  Amazonas is mostly rain forests and it has few roads.  People have to travel hours by boat along the rivers or they have to fly. Amazonas today has one of the best organized distance learning systems in the world. And we helped; our program made a big difference. And the authorities in Amazonas recognize and appreciate it.

Our principal was treated like a rock star by the HS students and she told me that this had been her experience during his whole time in Acre and Amazonas.  Students, teachers and administrators flocked around to have their picture taken with us or to offer their words of English.  With the social media, they are sharing these pictures and sharing their experience.  She told me that it had been like this during her whole trip. The other principals confirmed this with their own stories.  I lost track of the number of times I heard some variation of “Americans are so much better than we thought from the news or movies” I heard from the kids. 

I am certain that we will have had a lasting positive effect on Brazilian education and I think the exchanges of ideas will have a lasting positive impact on U.S. education. But strictly from the public diplomacy point of view, I don’t think we could have made a greater impact on youth audiences in any other way. These programs work.

As much as we want direct contact with the youth audiences – future decision-makers- which these programs give us, I still believe in the imperative of reaching current decision makers.  This exchange program got us in close personal contact with decision-makers like principals, politicians and state secretaries of eduction who will decide what to do now.  The principal I was working directly with in Amazonas has impact in the states of Amazonas and Acre.  This program also sent principals to Alagoas, Ceará, Espirito Santo, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Paraná, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Norte, Rondonia, Roraima, São Paulo, & Tocantins.  Suffice to say that the got to places were our public diplomacy would not otherwise reach.  They talked to people we would not otherwise meet and had experiences we will never have.  Beyond that, there is a network that has been created. This year’s principals are benefiting from those that went before and so shall it be in the future. I repeat because it bears repeating that the American nation is greater than the American government.  A program like this lets our public diplomacy leverage the power of the American nation.

I also repeat again – just about everything we do in public diplomacy is simple. Success depends on energy and persistence in the application of things almost all of us know to do. We have to get out of the offices and among the audiences, fewer meetings with each other and more meetings with audiences. And we have to leverage the efforts of others. We all know that. It is simple, but maybe not easy to do. My first weeks have included lots of travel and literally hundreds of meetings with Brazilians. This “boots on the ground” approach is also something that works.  I hope I have the energy to keep it up and to keep up with the Brazilians.

One more thing to add about our youth outreach. We are using the interaction of old and new media very well. During my stop at the TV Globo in Manaus, I ran into two of our vice-consuls, Dustin Salveson & David Fogelson doing TV and then online interviews about visas.  Nothing is we do really more interesting to Brazilian audiences than visas.  There are lots of myths and misconceptions.  Almost all Brazilians now who seek visas get them.  This is a change from years ago, but many people still believe the old system is still in place.

Beyond that, there is essentially no wait for student visas. I asked our vice-consuls to repeat that early and often.  You have to repeat the same message over and over. It gets boring for you to do it, but we have to remember that most people are hearing it for the first time and even if they heard it before, they probably did not pay attention. Our vice-consuls did a great job. You can see the pictures of the “event”. This is a trifecta. We get television, live-online interview and a written record. 

I believe that you have to understand before you can try to be understood, which is why I am doing so much contact work and travel in Brazil.  I am learning a lot and my Portuguese is improving too. The more I see of what we are doing in Brazil, the more encouraged I become. Our colleagues of the past laid a great foundation and our colleagues now of doing a great job. Beyond that and most important, the Brazilians like and appreciate what we are doing.  I have always been lucky with my posts, but this one seems to be beyond great fortune.

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Tentative Peace in the Complexo de Alemão

This is another of my out of order posts.  It is from my trip to Rio a while back.

National Basketball Association (NBA) players came to work with kids in the Complexo de Alemão, which just a few months ago was one of the worse and most violent favelas in Brazil. It requires the sustained intervention of the Brazilian army and police to push out the drug dealings and retake control of the neighborhood. They are employing a kind of counterinsurgency strategy that I recognize from Iraq. It is the “seize, hold, build” strategy at work.  General Petraeus would understand.

The back story is interesting, as one of the top-cops explained it to me. There was a political reaction against the police and the military after the end of military rule in the middle of the 1980s. One of the dominant modes of thinking explained and to an extent excused crime among poor people as a reaction to the violence and disrespect of the authorities. There were obvious problems with the police at the time and there was merit to the idea that the police should act less as an occupying force and more like members of the community, but what amounted to a partial withdrawal of the forces of order had a negative result. Of course, this is a simplified explanation and nothing ever happens for one simple reason, but this is part of the explanation.

In any case, the favelas were effectively out of control. Movies like “Tropa de Elite” show the situation, no doubt with some cinematic exaggeration, but the fact is that nobody would enter the favelas in safety and the crime spilled out into all regions of the city.

Crime was oppressing not only favela dwellers but spilled into other parts of the city. Some commentators almost seemed satisfied that the quality of life for “the rich” was declining because of the fear of violence, but a storm that wets the feet of the rich often drowns the poor. The rich retreated to walled compounds and hired guards. The poor just got robbed and killed. 

The Rio authorities decided to pacify the favelas. They started cautiously, trying to bring services into the favelas, building sport complexes. We had our NBA event in one of those complexes. It was/is a nice facility, but until the police established order, it was a used as drug emporium.  

Anyway, even the limited pacification efforts annoyed the drug lords of the favelas, who wanted to keep things the way they were. Evidently to show their displeasure and get the government to back off, the drug gangs started to attack and burn cars and buses outside the favelas, but instead of backing down, the government doubled down. It was a heroic moment. State, local and Federal authorities cooperated to retake the territory from the drug gangs. The Brazilian army literally invaded the favelas, taking them back from the traficantes. Following the forces came services. It was the “seize, hold & build” strategy.

Today police presence remains strong and obvious, but the big story is the return of life and vitality to the favela.  I was able to walk freely in places were heavily armed police could not tread just last year. 

The authorities have no illusions about wiping out the drug trade. There will always be criminals. But there is a big difference between crime that goes on in the world and actual control of territory by criminal gangs.  It was important to secure the authority of the government. When they raised the Brazilian flag on the high point of the favela de Alemão at the end of November last year it was a proud day for the Cariocas and all Brazilians. 

So far, so good. The streets of the favela are now crowded with people and the shops have products in them.  There is a chance now. The security has been established, the essential first step. Now the government is making investments in infrastructure. You can see all the workers in the pictures. It is also an auspicious time because the Brazilian economy is growing and providing jobs. But perhaps the most surprising development, one unpredicted by experts, is the dropping birthrate within the favelas. This will give Brazilian authorities and people of Brazil a breathing space to make the changes they need to make in the culture and nature of the favelas.

The pictures are from the favela. You can see the closeup of what it looks like. The favela is a kind of vertical city. It crawls up the hill. It reminds me of those Pueblo Indian dwellings, only much bigger. One guys roof is another’s front yard and walking the streets near the top means climbing stairs and even ladders. 

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Work-Work-Work

My posts will be late an out of order.  I am really enjoying my work in Brazil and I asked my colleagues to create very tight schedules for me on my travels.  They did.  I am usually scheduled with an early morning or breakfast meeting, meetings during the day and then some sort of representational event at night.  I don’t write this so much to brag (maybe a little) but to emphasize the scheduling.   Back home, some people think the life of a diplomat is just doing fun things … and it often is.  It is great fun and personally rewarding to have the chance to meet so many Brazilians and talk to them about such a wide variety of concerns. 

But it is also very tiring.  I always tell people that everything about doing public diplomacy is simple.  You just have to keep doing it and keep doing it.  It is also hard to speak Portuguese all day AND at the same time keep track of the important things that are being said.  You will read in subsequent posts about our visits to a high-tech complex in Recife.  It is hard to talk nanotech in Portuguese.  Actually, many of the high-tech words are almost the same, but the concepts are not easy in a foreign language.

The biggest challenge is writing notes.  What I post on the blog are derivatives of the notes, so you know what I am talking about.  I take out most of the names and some of the details and add a few more touristic details.  I generally cannot take written notes during meetings.  It would be strange or bad manners to pull out the old note book at every lunch meeting.  So I have to write notes within a day or two, otherwise I forget details.   If I don’t make a note and share it with others it is not really much of a meeting from the practical point of view. 

I think I should add a note about the “tourist” aspects of diplomacy, because this is something I  didn’t understand as a junior officer.  My first time in Brazil, I mostly worked on the things people call work. I wrote all my reports, made the official points etc.  I think I did a good job, but not a great one because I didn’t understand that the fundamental task of a diplomat (IMO) is to understand and appreciate the local reality.  I am not talking about the usual tourism, of course, but of a better understanding. The people I contact in Manaus want to know that I have seen and appreciate their Opera House, for example, even if some of them have not actually visited themselves, BTW. So one of the most important tasks is to learn about the points of pride or concern and just be there.  Imagine a diplomat in Washington who never had time to visit the Washington Monument or the Smithsonian.  His credibility is compromised.   So now I make it my business to study the places I go.  It makes my job a lot more interesting and makes me much more effective.  That is the part the blog posts reflect. 

The Brazilians that I meet  have often known other American diplomats.  The ones that they remember, the ones that were effective, are those that knew and appreciated Brazil, not the ones that effectively delivered talking points about the most recent hot issue.  They did that too, but they knew that the message has to be delivered in the proper cultural context.

My rant is done.  Have to get to work now.

The picture up top is indeed the Manaus Opera House, which I made sure to see. Below is a picture of modern Manaus.  It is a big and dynamic city. You would not know you were in the Amazon, except for the remarkable heat and humidity. 

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Sports Diplomacy

I wrote about music in public diplomacy a few posts back.  This one is about sports diplomacy. I am belatedly getting around to writing this; it actually happened in Rio before the music program in São Paulo.

This one was also depended on the generosity of individual Americans, this time NBA basketball players. This program was also a great deal for us; it cost us absolutely nothing except our time to support the activities and publicize them.

Our part consisted mostly of attending a basketball clinic at a community center in the Complexo do Alemão.  This was one of the most violent and dangerous places in the world until a few months ago. It was controlled by drug gangs. Honest people were in constant danger and the police could not enter many of the areas; they were outgunned by the traffickers. As the City of Rio tried to establish order, the traffickers lashed out.  They attack and burned buses and cars to show that they were serious about their violence and get the authorities to back down. Instead, the Brazilian authorities went all in, using the military and special police units to pacify the favela.

What we see now is a variation of the “seize, hold, build” counterinsurgency strategy. In fact, walking on the streets reminded me of my time in Iraq. These former violent places were bouncing back.  There was still a heavy police presence to maintain order, but the emphasis now was on building and providing services.

The basketball (Called basketball without borders) was helping with the reconstruction of civil society.  NBA players came at their own expense and the NBA paid to set up a basketball court, which they inaugurated with the clinic that you see in some of the pictures.

Our post in Rio did a good job of publicizing the event. I use a variation of the old saying that it is like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise.  This event could have happened w/o us.  IMO, it would not have been as successful, but who knows?  But we (the post) helped call attention what was happening and explain its significance. So it is not like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise. It is rather like the rooster calling attention to the rising sun; he spreads the good news so that others can understand the significance and benefit from the light and the warmth. It is a very important task.  

Sports, like music, engage people that we often cannot engage with our programs. Also like the music, we could not possible afford to pay the participants what their talent is worth, so we are grateful that they give it freely. Above and below you can see the public diplomacy tasks. The bottom show our Rio colleague explaining to one of the kids how things work. Other pictures show the NBA athletes teaching kids; the local community showing its talents with dance and capoeira.

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São Paulo: the City That Never Ends

If New York is the city that never sleeps, São Paulo might be the city that never ends. I got to the top of the Banespa Building and looked over city almost as far as the eye can see. Because it was a windy day and the air was clearer than usual, you can see the hills in the far background. Most days, the horizon just shades off into the mist. The Banespa Building started in 1939 and completed almost eight years later. It was the tallest building in São Paulo for twenty years and at the time of its inauguration the tallest building outside the United States. It is modeled after the Empire State Building. The pictures were taken from the top. Above & below is the São Paulo skyline.

Below is the Sao Paulo cathedral from the roof.

Below is a rooftop garden and heliport. It is interesting the parallel worlds that exist in a three dimensional big city. From the street, you would never know that there was a forest park overhead. 

Below is one more view of Sao Paulo. If you look right in the middle you will see a rooftop mansion.

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All That Jazz

We helped bring some music to the favela, as I mentioned in the earlier post. The leader of the group was Delfeayo Marsalis. His whole family is talented and most people have heard of his brothers, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Branford was the leader of the band on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno before Kevin Eubanks.  

They played New Orleans style music, but they were not there just to perform. They were there to work with the kids from the favela and they did a wonderful job, inviting kids to perform with them and encouraging everyone to develop their own style based on their own heritage. Above you can see the student orchestra that played for our jazz musicians, showing them Brazilian style.

I am not in the entertainment business. What we want to do is to increase understanding between Americans and Brazilians. This program worked. I could see it on the faces of the kids in the audience and hear it in the words of their parents and teachers. The community will remember this for a long time. The good feelings will linger as everybody remembers the talented Americans who shared their talents and appreciated the talents of Brazilians. The good coverage we got in the media will help spread the word. It was good all around.

The American nation is greater than the American government. This was a good example. We (USG) helped bring the jazz players, but we helped defray only a part of their expenses. The musicians contributed their time and talent. They were paid in the joy they shared with young Brazilians, but theirs was an act of charity and good will. 

This is true of most of the participants in our programs. We could not afford to pay these talented people what their time is worth, but they give it freely. It always makes me proud to be in the company of such people. I tell them, but I am not sure they believe me. It sounds a bit schmaltzy, as it does when I write it, but it is the truth. The only true wealth of a nation is contained in its people. We are blessed with great people and it is good just to stop sometimes and be thankful.

Look at the joy on the base player’s face. That joy comes from losing yourself in the flow of an activity. Music is one of the most common, but it also happens in sports or any task that is a challenge that can be mastered but remains a challenge. It is important to remember that nobody can give this joy to anybody else, since it comes from the accomplishment based on hard work,  but they can inspire it in others.

My pictures are self explanatory. I took them all during the workshop. Sorry about some of the focus problems. The light was hard for me to work with.  I don’t really know how to work the camera and rely on the automatic settings.

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The Other Side of Sao Paulo

Like all big cities, São Paulo is a city of neighborhoods with characters of their own. The city has some beautiful areas of big homes and beautiful gardens.  It also has some less beautiful sides. The pictures are from a favela are called Heliopolis. You can see what it looks like from the pictures, but the pictures don’t tell the whole story.

The favela is very lively.  You can see the shops. They do some nice graffiti as advertising signs.  The picture up top say “potato point.”

We helped sponsor a jazz workshop in a local music school. I am not a big fan of jazz, but this was a great program. The jazz musicians worked with local music students.  All of them came from the favela and all of them were committed to learning music and by extension other things. For them, music was a live changing experience. I learned from talking to some of them that they did not depend on the “big score”, which is often a curse of the aspirational poor. They weren’t counting on being big rock stars. Instead, they were working hard to perfect their craft.  Most understood that they would not be able to make a career in music, but they knew also that music would enrich their lives and improve it in other ways. The discipline of music was what they wanted and what they were getting. I will add more details in the next post.

People take the opportunity, even in the poorest and ostensibly most hopeless places.  It is a tribute to the human spirit and to the power of arts and music to let it soar.  This is not THE solution to the problems of the favelas, but it is a step in right direction.

Below shows one of the many signs of advancing evangelicalism in Brazil, especially among the poor. 

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São Paulo

The dominant activity during my four-day visit to São Paulo was sitting in traffic between the many wonderful visits that my colleagues at the Consulate in São Paulo arranged for me.  After a while, I started to notice the landmarks and the geography. We really were not going very far, but it was taking a long time because of the traffic, a very long time.

People in São Paulo have adapted to this traffic and the uncertainty it creates about arrivals. Nobody is upset when you arrive late … or early. We don’t often associate traffic challenges with early arrival, but that happens too. You build in time with the “expected traffic”. It can be worse, but it can also be better. Traffic was lighter than expected on a couple of occasions. My colleagues called ahead, apologized for coming early and asked if we could move our appointment forward. Of course, we also called ahead to explain that we would be late when conditions were different. 

The key to success seems to be the mobile phone. It doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, but allows all participants a range of estimates. My colleagues call ahead and tell the person on the other end of the line what landmarks we are currently passing. Evidently everybody is so familiar with the landmarks and the expected traffic patterns that they can make an estimate themselves. 

We were lucky to have a Consulate driver, who knew the roads and more importantly the characteristics of the places we were going. A lot of time can be spent getting in and out of building complexes. There are lots of gates and lots of guards. Going down the wrong way can cost time and tension. Our driver was highly skilled at fitting into and through spaces I thought were way too small.  Many of the government buildings have parking and garages inside, but they are not obvious parking garages like you might find in the U.S. Instead, you have what looks like a pedestrian entrance with a gate. I would never have thought to turn into a place like this. 

I don’t know how I could have done business w/o my colleagues and the driver. Actually, I do know. It would not have been nearly as easy. I would have spent even more time in traffic, in taxis and been lost most of the time.  I think I might have walked more. Some of the places were not far apart if you went on foot.  I prefer to walk, whenever possible, but walking is not always a safe activity. Although the crime rate in São Paulo has dropped, it is still high. More urgently is the difficulty of crossing some of the streets, because of all that traffic we talked about earlier.   

When the traffic slows or stops, people literally run between the cars to cross street.  One of my colleagues advised me NOT to cross at the walk signal, which he said was more dangerous than waiting for the cars to stop and dashing between them.  It reminds me of that old video game “frogger”. The cars are a hazard, but at least you can get a fair idea about their movements. The more immediate menace, IMO, comes from motorcycles.  These things race between and among the cars as they wait in traffic. When I say “race” that is what I mean. They are not edging down the road.  They are going at high speed, creating a danger to themselves, cars and pedestrians. Some of the motorcycles have altered handlebars to make them narrower. This allows them to fit through even narrower spaces, but also reduces leverage & makes them harder to steer. Neither thing is good. Brazilians authorities have moved to make such alterations illegal, w/o significant results, in my observation.

I don’t see a way out for São Paulo. It is just too big. At some point any system becomes too big to properly manage. People have adapted in many ways, as I mentioned above with things like flexible schedules.  São Paulo offers many benefits that – so far – outweigh the costs for most residents.  I talked to many people who cannot imagine living anywhere except São Paulo.  They are a lot like inveterate New Yorkers in that respect. The things you can do in São Paulo are almost limitless – IF you can get to them.  You might be better off locating elsewhere and dipping into São Paulo when you need something.  A commute via air from Brasilia is shorter than a drive from one end of São Paulo to the other. I am not the only one to figure this out. I hear that businesses are locating outside the city if they can. The problem is that they have to go a long way before they are out of the city. I have decided that São Paulo is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here. Having a hotel near restaurants and meeting is great.  I could walk to some places.  Most people don’t have that luxury and I would not have it if I lived in São Paulo permanently. I can stand being entombed in traffic sometimes, but every day would be more than I could tolerate. 

My pictures are from the TV Globo affiliate in Sao Paulo. The bridge is one of the landmarks of the local area. It is a nice bridge that doesn’t carry much traffic. If you live on the road serviced by it, you are lucky. The river you see has a very distinct smell. You are lucky to have only the photo.  

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EducationUSA

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff wants to send 100,000 Brazilian students to study science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in other countries by the end of her term and we want to help. It is the classic win/win. American universities are coming to Brazil to get their share of the new students. We have an opportunity rich environment. Great.

Americans and Brazilians have been working together on this for a long time. We have the venerable Fulbright program, which was established in Brazil in 1957. U.S. universities have been active in Brazil and Brazilians have looked to the U.S. for more than a hundred years. American universities are acknowledged to be the best in the world.  It is an embarrassment of riches. We have all the networks in place and they have been working well for a long time, but now we are going to push more through the network than ever before.

Among our best assets is a regional educational advising center (REAC), headquartered in Rio at PUC University. I visited there during my recent visit to Rio. PUC, our Brazilian partner institution, gives us the space, which is at a premium on their crowded campus. Their students also provide volunteer support in marketing and advertising the services. In addition, we have advisers at twenty-three other centers, such as BNCs, around Brazil and three offices at private universities. State Department’s Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) office trains the advisers, but they are paid and otherwise supported by their local Brazilian institutions. Such is the demand for this service that our partners are happy to cooperate. The centers can defray some of their expenses by offering translation services and consultation on writing in English, but they do not charge prospective students for educational advising.  

One of their big activities is sponsoring Education USA fairs. American universities come to Brazil to recruit students.  The advising centers can and do charge U.S. institution to defray costs.  Interest in Brazil is growing and the fair in Rio scheduled for this fall is already booked up with fifty U.S. universities. Other centers also hold fairs.  The BNC Casa Thomas Jefferson will hold a fair later this month in Brasilia, for example. 

Nobody really knows how many Brazilian students there are currently in the U.S.  Our deceptively precise number is 8786, but we get this figure by a survey of answers supplied voluntarily by U.S. universities. Our educational advisers think this number is lower than the real one. They mentioned anecdotal evidence of universities where they know there are Brazilian students that reported none, but the real number in not much more. If Dilma’s aspiration becomes a reality, there would be more than four times as many coming to the U.S. in the next four years. This is a big bump and you get an idea of the challenge. 

One thing we have to explain to Brazilians is that America’s higher education system is extremely decentralized. The Federal government cannot order state or private universities to admit Brazilian students or offer them tuition discounts. This must be done on a individual basis. The good news is that we have hundreds of excellent universities in the U.S. and many want to get Brazilian students to diversity their student body and build a future alumni network in what will be a much more important country in the future. One of our (Embassy & REAC) goals is to spread the students out over the U.S. Brazilians tend to know only a few American universities.  Everybody wants to go to Harvard, MIT or University of California and who can blame them. But dropping thousands of Brazilians into a few institutions would not be desirable, even if it were possible. Our task is to explain the diversity of American education. We have many excellent choices and sometimes the best programs for a particular student might be at an American university that few in Brazil (maybe few Americans too) know exists.

Our centers are reaching out to Brazilians to explain things like that and to help with applications.  Their motto is that studying in America is “mais fácil do que você pensa” easier than you think. We have to remind students that there is essentially no waiting line for a student visa to the U.S. and that it is indeed, easier than they think. 

This is a great opportunity to shape the future of Brazilian-American relations through education.  It is truly a win-win. We just have to do it.

My pictures – at top is Rio from my hotel window. You see the symmetry of the reflection in the glass. I didn’t get perfect symmetry because I could hang only so far out the window w/o falling 21 floors. Might have been a cool picture on the way down, however. Below that you see graffiti artists at the Complexo de Alemao, a favela that the Rio authorities recently took back from gangs and drug dealers. Third down is the Kennedy Wing at PUC. It is dedicated to the U.S. and JFK. Bobby Kennedy came down for the commemoration of the bust in the picture.