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Adventures and Volunteer Work in Brazil
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Posted by
harfijah
Monday, March 18, 2002
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An Introduction by Illene Pevec and an amazing story from a young member's experience in Brazil by Myra Margolin. Don't miss this one. Read on my friend....
Myra wrote this piece about her experience in Brazil as a volunteer with the project that I am doing in cooperation with Subud members in southern Brazil. It's called in Portuguese :Projeto Sossego do Meio Ambiente and in English, A Child's Garden of Peace.
We would like her report to go out on the SYA email list serve so that others who might be interested can learn about what is the life of a volunteer in this project.
It is obviously not for the faint of heart. I was ever so lucky to have Myra. She was calm, quiet and totally present with the kids. On top of that she was a great roommate.
When you are working in a challenging environment (eg foreign culture, heat, bugs, no privacy) to have such a wonderful volunteer is a
blessing on all levels.
I will be returning to Brazil, God willing, in late Sept. or early October. I will be doing a few more weeks of work with the children and youth in
Santo Angelo and then taking at least one bus load to Iguassu national park for the kids to see the waterfalls and the last big piece of the Atlantic
Forest in the region.
The purpose of the program is sustainable community development and alive education for the children. Another volunteer would be most welcome.
Someone willing to teach English to the kids via arts and games would be great as would anyone with organic gardening skills, recyling and other
environmental skills.
Computer skills would be very helpful to the Subud
couple who host this program. We hope to extend the kind of computer education that can be offered to these children who are from a very poor
community by the school. I would love to have a drama program for the kids, but that takes Portuguese speaking ability.
People with a health background could help with the nutrition and cooking program. The volunteer needs to be a self-starter and personally motivated to do this kind of work.
As I said in my last email which landed me the wonderful services of Myra. Iit is important that no one come who smokes, has alcohol or drug problems. (Smoking is not allowed around the children or on any group activity or in any part of the school or house.) It is a very tiny little cabin we live in.
The Subud members provide room and board to volunteer--room in the cabin and board in their house. The small town has no diversions except a
few cafes and bars, but the local community of teens and children are very warm and welcoming. It is usually a time of intensive work with a swimming pool for recreation and heat relief. The reward is the adoration of the children who are as warm, loving and giving as any on earth.
Love,
Illene
Myra's Brazil Experience
2/8/02
It is my last night here in Santo Angelo. We have just returned from a party with the kids Ň lots of dancing. Samba and a dance which is a little
like the polka and another whose name I didnĚt catch. Some of the kids amazed me with their sambas, quick and agile, their little hips moving so
fast. Tonight is the second night of Carnaval and Santo Angelo is relatively quiet compared to what I imagine is going on in the bigger cities.
I was just outside in the backyard of this house where we are staying, the home of Ignez and Afonso Luft (two thirds of Santo AngeloĚs
Subud group). The stars are clear. On my left was the outline of hanging grape vines. On my right, Dukie the big watchdog, barked madly, wanting
attention. Everyone has dogs here and they arenĚt allowed into houses; at night we fall asleep to a chorus of canine insomniacs.
Now, in the living room, Big Brother Brazil, a Real World spin-off, plays on the TV. Earlier today it was The Simpsons, dubbed.
Tonight, after the kids went home, we danced by Afonso and IgnezĚs pool with the teenagers who have been working as counselors at the three week summer camp that I have also been working at, as a volunteer.
The camp is the creation of Illene Pevec who was here in Santo Angelo for three months last year. During that time, she set up a community garden and did community clean-ups with the kids from Centro Sul, one of Santo AngeloĚs poor neighborhoods. She is back now continuing the project and will come again in the fall. As I understand it, she will continue to make trips here
until she feels the project is fully sustained by members of the community.
The teenagers, with whom we danced in the sunset and then the night withlights set up around the pool, are new additions this year. Illene hopes
that they will be able to work after she is gone, each with a group of kids, to keep the garden going.
I am very grateful for these teenagers. I arrived in Brazil with no Portuguese under my belt. No Spanish or Italian either, both of which would
have been moderately helpful. I took out language tapes from the library before I came and they accustomed me to the sound of the language but didnĚt help much with speaking. No one here speaks English except Illene and for the first five or so days I felt pretty disoriented and lost.
It took a long time to get to Santo Angelo. There was a broken down car, tow trucks, a bus in the middle of the night. By the time we arrived, I was in quite a haze.
I was in Santo Angelo for a day before I started throwing up. Luckily that only lasted one day but the combination of sickness, travelling, and not
being able to communicate had me feeling frustrated.
I spent a lot of the time feeling lost. Illene, Afonso, and Ignez were busily planning for the summer camp and long conversations in Portuguese whirled around me as I sat after meals, not understanding the talk and not knowing what to do with myself.
Afonso and Ignez live a fifteen minute walk from the center of town (a walk it took me the entire month to learn to do alone) so there was no
where to go. I am used to being very independent and having to rely on other people whenever I needed anything was also very difficult for me.
For all of the things that were frustrating that first week, there were an equal number of new things which filled me with wonder and excitement. I
kept ping-ponging back and forth between the two extreme emotions. I loved Santo Angelo right away.
Having lived in New York City for over five years
now, I have been ready for a change for some time. September Eleventh exacerbated this. Santo Angelo is a small city in the south of Brazil. It
is surrounded by farmland and small towns. There is not much here in terms of culture or good restaurants but I find it very beautiful and calming.
Many of the streets are made of broken stone and red dirt. The houses are many colors. There are trees and flowers everywhere and from Afonso and IgnezĚs pool one can look out over long stretches of green farmland.
Afonso and Ignez have some property a few blocks from their house (the pool is there and the summer camp was held there part of the time) where there are a few cows and uncultivated land in which to walk.
My first meal here included grape juice made from grapes from the yard, beef from one of their cows, and tomatoes from their garden. It is common for someone here to just reach up and pull down fruit from a nearby tree. I have tasted all sorts of new fruits whose names IĚll never remember.
Slowly I became adjusted though I continued to feel lost for quite some time. The campĚs schedule would change (this happened a lot at the
beginning because they were working out kinks) and I wouldnĚt know about it and suddenly everyone would be leaving. I wouldnĚt know why and I couldnĚt ask because I didnĚt know how to ask in Portuguese.
Illene was setting up the whole camp and was very busy and, because meetings were held in
Portuguese, I often wouldn't know what was expected of me, what materials were available to me, or if something had already been planned for that day.
I felt a bit like a headless chicken at times, walking around the pen, bumping into fenses. Meeting the teenagers a week after IĚd arrived was a turning point. Maybe it was them, maybe it was simply that I'd had a week to adjust.
There were twelve teenagers volunteering with the project, some of whom had studied a tiny bit of English in school. Sitting in a circle on the second or third day of the camp, kids throwing balls and playing soccer all around us, we were able (with my dictionary) to talk about things like movies, music and the World Trade Center. (When I say "talk" I mean looking up a word and then making many hand motions to elaborate on the point).
For nearly a week before this my communication had been limited to some translation from Illene, brief talks with Illene, lots and lots of staring blankly during conversations in Portuguese, and talks with children involving pointing to an object, the children saying the name of the object in Portuguese and me
responding with the English word. It was good for learning the language but not quite enough intellectual stimulation to sustain me.
Even though the teenagers didn't speak English, their maturity (compared to the seven year
olds) was extremely refreshing. After learning a little Portuguese, figuring out my role in the camp, and learning my way around Santo Angelo, the frustration was like a little bath cube dissolving away to make a sweet, comforting situation.
Before continuing, I will include a brief note about the structure of the camp. There were around a hundred kids total. Because of the massive
volume of children and lack of space and adults, the kids were divided by age (6-9 and 10-14). During any given morning or afternoon, only half of
the kids came (either the older ones or the younger ones). Activities were held both on Afonso and IgnezĚs property (with the pool) and at a community
center in Centro Sul where the garden is located.
Twelve teenagers from the community volunteered as counselors and two adults from the community worked as adult supervisors. When activities were held at the community center, Ignez cooked with some of the kids.
Every morning and afternoon the kids received a snack (often a cake made by Ignez the night before. Very few of the children eat breakfast and some donĚt get enough to eat at home in
general. It was very instructive for me to observe the evolution of the camp. There were many roadblocks along the way, mostly interpersonal (one of the blessings of not speaking the language was the exclusion from involvement in interpersonal problems). Illene had a lot to deal with on this trip and I have learned an enormous amount from watching the way in which she addressed
and solved these problems. She was always very level headed and fair, both compassionate and firm.
I find that this is an extremely difficult balance to achieve and am very grateful to have worked with Illene and observed her working process.
I am also grateful to have been able to volunteer with this project. In the past, I have been turned off by volunteer experiences which have ended up
being very bureaucratic. Often I have felt like I am not being as effective as possible because of constrictions imposed by rules or structure. I have
also felt very remote from the people with whom I'm working.
Here, we are very close with the community with which we're working. Illene has talked to the kids a lot and has used their feedback to shape the nature of the program. There is absolutely no bureaucracy in this project. It is just Illene who is supportive, competent, flexible and wise. For me, I can't imagine a better volunteer experience.
The camp met for a few hours in the morning, had a break in the afternoon, and reconvened for two hours at in the late afternoon. Most days, the kids
were divided into three groups and rotated between three different activities. I was in charge of one of these activities.
Communicating to the kids was a challenge but not nearly as challenging as one would imagine. They are really wonderful kids - affectionate, enthusiastic, generally well behaved. They caught on very quickly if I said a word or two and then
demostrated the activity.
We did various art projects (collages, painted rocks, masks and instruments for Carnaval, drawings from nature). Every activity with me was a mini English lesson for the kids because of the
language barrier but some days the activities were tailored towards learning English (drawing a landscape and labeling it in English, tracing a childĚs
body on a large piece of paper and labeling body parts).
The kids were incredibly instrumental in my learning Portuguese. I hope they were able to
learn a bit of English too.
By this last week my disorientation has given way to comfort. I think that it takes a while to get adjusted whenever someone is in a new place. I know that it took about six months for me to feel like my apartment in NY was actually my home. I only had one month here so the process was accelerated.
It is interesting, looking back, to see the transition. It happened gradually but always moved forward. I do regret that I don't have longer here as I finally feel fully adjusted. An enormous help were the daily Portuguese lessons Afonso has given me these last two weeks. I have learned a lot of vocabulary with the kids but have a lot of questions about grammar and usage with which Afonso has helped me.
Also of great help were the few Brazilians that I met here who spoke some English. I had one conversation each with a man from the state government and a journalist from a paper here in Santo Angelo. In these conversations
I was able to ask all of the questions that had arisen from my introduction to Brazilian life via this very poor community.
I had many questions about the opportunities available to the children and teenagers we were working with; I had questions about social services, higher education, poverty, and Brazilian politics. What I learned from these conversations helped me put my experience in a broader context. Many of my observations involved trying to compare poverty in America to poverty here in Santo Angelo (and figuring out how much I could generalize about the rest of Brazil based on Santo
Angelo).
Experiencing a culture very different from my own has been very good for me. I think about what I learn in a month in New York and what I have learned here and the difference is astronomical. Over the past year I have increasing felt the need to see how other people live. My frame of
reference has seemed, to me, very narrow. The way of life here, in Centro Sul in particular, is very different from my own. I went to the home of the
Brazilian journalist, a girl my age from a middle class home, and her lifestyle was much more familiar to me.
I think that in order to get a well-rounded sense of the lifestyle here I would have to be here for a much longer period of time. I can only observe the most obvious differences. In Centro Sul, for instance, the houses are very small. People spend a lot of time outside. When we visited families, they all pulled the chairs out of the house and set up a circle for entertaining outside in front of the
house. When we visited one family, word spread like a spilled drink and suddenly we were surrounded by kids.
Because the houses are so small, entire families sleeping in one room, there is not the same sense of ownership, privacy, and personal space that I grew up with. This keeps many families living in conditions that are undesirable and uncomfortable but, most likely, it is also one of the major factors that facilitates the warm and open community feeling. The community, the children in particular, were incredibly welcoming, open, and generous towards me and this helped enormously in making me feel comfortable here.
Now I am wrapping up here. Tonight we danced with the kids and ate chicken. I made them chocolate chip cookies, "a dessert from America." I can now almost form an entire sentence in Portuguese. I understand conversations if
they are spoken slowly and I know the context (though most of the time I still need translation). I have rediscovered my independence. I can go to
the store on my own. Ask questions. I know my way to the places I need to go.
I understand how the schedule works. I know the routine. I know all of this now and tomorrow Illene and I board a bus that will take us to the Iguasu Falls, another new place. After that, she goes back to Canada and I head to Manaus in the middle of the Amazon.
I am sitting here in the living room now. The dogs are barking as usual. When I leave here and walk through the backyard to the small guest house
where Illene and I sleep, I will be able to stop beneath the grape vines and flowering trees and look up and find OrionĚs belt (something Illene taught
me on a weekend trip we took to nearby Indian ruins). The other day I did a quick test about something and (much to my surprise) received in Portuguese.
I am thinking now about the first conversation I had with Afonso, the day I arrived in Brazil. We are walking down a city street in Porto Allegre
(the city I flew in to). Behind us Ignez and Illene are having an animated conversation in Portuguese. Despite the language tapes, I canĚt say a
thing. I rack my brain ten times over for any vocabulary word. I think I come up with "mother" and "father" but what about mother and father? I have no verbs to use. No adjectives. It is utterly hopeless and within three minutes Afonso and I give up trying to converse and he joins Illene and
Ignez. I walk alone, silently, and wonder if Afonso and Ignez will remain strangers forever because we'll never be able to communicate.
I overestimated the importance of language in a major way. They have opened up their home and their lives to me, fed me, given me lessons, looked after me. We have done latihan (Illene, Ignez and I in one room, Afonso alone in another) a few times each week. We talk together now, I in a very broken Portuguese, they in very slow and clear voices with little bits of English.
We do well this way. And I feel very close to them now. At this point, I donĚt think speaking the same language would make us much closer (although
it would make things easier). I suppose thatĚs how I feel about my entire experience here. Knowing the language would certainly have made things
easier but I canĚt imagine how it could have added any more depth or intimacy to an experience which has been very full of both.
Myra
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