Coffee Cooperatives, Caipirinhas, and Carrot Cake

So, as you saw in last week's post, I am definitely settling in here, and it has only gotten better since last week. I have been pretty busy with quite a few endeavors, personal and professional. First let me mention that I have made quite a bit of headway on an article that I would like to submit sometime this year (this might not be interesting to you, but it definitely is to me, since it was always so difficult to sit down and write in Kansas, what with teaching, classes, and, uh, bars...). I learned to appreciate the "downtime" I had in the last few weeks, since it allowed me to get ahead on that article, as well as some other stuff.

I suspect that I will be a bit busier from here on out. I made my first visit to Guaxupé, Minas Gerais (the home of Cooxupé Cooperative, that I will be working with) and Monte Santo de Minas, a smaller city and the home of the cooperative núcleo where I will probably be focusing most of my data collection. I was in those two places for a day and a half meeting with various cooperative officials and discussing possible collaborative efforts with them. I must say that what we ended up agreeing on was not what I imagined we would, exactly, but this is because my own lack of knowledge about the cooperative led me to be very surprised by everything, I mean everything, I found there. I knew they were a well-established and highly-developed coffee cooperative, but the reality that I found was much, much more complex and complicated than I imagined, even after only a day! What was hard for me was how different the reality of this cooperative is from that of CECOCAFEN in Nicaragua, where I worked for three years; every assumption I ever had about coffee production, coffee markets, social justice, small and large farmers, must be questioned and assessed anew here in Brazil. I never thought Minas would be like Matagalpa, I just didn't expect so much contrast, different successes and different struggles entirely. I have a lot to learn here and I will have a lot of opportunity to learn, as I work collecting data on socio-economic and environmental conditions on farms, in relation to the norms of various coffee certifications, and as I study the process the cooperative is going through in order to achieve fair trade certification for its small-scale members, which make up 80% of its membership of almost 12,000 coffee farmers. I will write more about that later, since it is really incredible what they are doing. I go back to Monte Santo de Minas this coming Wednesday, and will accompany a few of the cooperative managers to Belo Horizonte (the capital of the state of Minas Gerais) to attend a Symposium on Social Responsibility in Coffee Production there on Friday and Saturday, and I think I will go back to Monte Santo on Monday or Tuesday next.

In other news...I won third place in a Caipirinha-making Contest last Sunday, as part of an unlikely team made up of myself, Sandra from France, and Ismael from Iran, who is here doing some research on sugarcane-processing or something like that. A caipirinha is a mixed drink that is made from pinga (cane alcohol, also known as cachaça), limes, sugar and ice. A glass of it is traditionally passed from person to person, making it a communal cocktail. We named our team "Babylonia"--I think we meant to name it "Babel", but we were already well on our way to being drunk off caipirinhas by the time our team was to compete (everyone but Ismael, who doesn't drink or speak Portuguese). Third place!! Everyone there was a little surprised, since none of us really knew how to make caipirinhas clásicas, which was the category we competed in. The second photo is our team Babylonia-Babel; the first is the table of judges trying the various submissions (two-thirds of the judges panel were professors from FEAGRI!). The third photo is--you guessed it--E.T.! That special alien made an appearance at a parade for the opening of an art festival that passed the street in front of the venue where the caipirinha contest was happening.

Otherwise, Sandra and I have managed to do the YMCA in a bar with a group of friends from FEAGRI (see photo at right--I think they are doing the ¨M¨), get lost on an expedition downtown via public transportation, visit Parque Don Pedro (the largest shopping mall in Latin America! Hooray!), and basically have a good time while getting something done. Mostly.

I had a little saudade (longing, nostalgia) for things American this morning (shocking, no?), so I got the verve up to make a carrot cake. My first Brazilian carrot cake! At right is a photo of the cake, which is excellent, by the way, although not so pretty! Pure butter...yum...

All work and some play, too...

I was thinking today that I haven´t talked about work at all in my last few posts, so here is a little update on how that is going. First, my experiences here thus far working on developing my project with Julieta (my advisor here), have been really different than my experiences developing my Master´s thesis topic and methodology in Kansas. I don´t know yet if it is a difference between the research styles of Chris, my advisor in Kansas, and Julieta, a difference between Geography as a discipline and Agricultural Engineering as a discipline, or a difference between Brazilian academia and US academia. So far, what impresses me most is the strong focus here on establishing and documenting a solid methodology, whereas in Kansas no one ever really asked me for an incredibly concrete documented methodology. The result is that I am really enjoying this process of laying out and thinking through very meticulously what it is I am doing. I am also getting a lot of coaching and feedback on the questionaire and interview questions I am formulating. It is really, really cool, and very helpful. I feel like even if this particular project does not become part of my future dissertation, it will be a very solid and good study all by itself. I have not been out to the cooperative yet, but I go next week.


Sandra, a visiting researcher from France, arrived to Campinas two nights ago, and she is staying in the same pensionato that I am. She is cool--she speaks very little Portuguese, but does speak English, so it has taken a lot of effort to not speak English all the time with her, and only when it is necessary. We went out last night with some friends from the lab. Lots, I mean, lots of fun and it was good to get out and let loose for a night. Agricultural engineers are crazy. Here are some photos. Sandra is the one with the bottle and glass in her mouth...
Tchau!

On blogging, and other deep stuff

I have been reflecting on the nature of blogging in the six-or-so days that I have not written in my blog. Blogging is nihilistic. It is about perspective, experience from a particular--personal--position. This blog rejects any other perspective, because it is written purely from my perspective. It is really postmodern, no? Really relativistic, in the sense that everyone's experiences and opinions are valid (or validated) in a blog.
This is the point at which I pause and consider what that might mean. At first glance, I think it seems extravagant to write about how I am experiencing the physical world, when there are so many other people experiencing it in frankly and obviously horrible ways and, instead of contemplating my navel and writing about it, perhaps it would be more useful to do something...useful. I do. I do useful things in the ways that I can. Things that don't only serve my own existence but also that of others. At least I like to think so.
So, knowing that, I arrive to the question of whether blogging is useful and not just some postmodern activity that shares some of the qualities of masturbation. Well, at this point I remember that I read, a lot. I read novels, many, many novels, all the time (I am on my 6th novel since I arrived to Brazil 9 days ago). I remember and reflect that many of my ideas of love, value, justice, and even cynicism have been inspired by messages found within the pages and between the lines of novels of my favorite authors, artists like José Saramago and Carlos Fuentes. This tells me something: art (and a blog is art, as it is the invention of a mind and the expression of experience) is extravagant, it is superfluous to violence and violation, the unnecessary pain of human beings, but it is a necessary expression of hope, a communication of other and better ways than we perhaps learned by more conventional channels.
So, I resolve myself to believe that this blog matters. It does to me.

Moving on. This week I have continued to get accustomed to things here. I have hung out with new friends, met new people, and continued getting to know the people I had met already. I got to hang out for the afternoon with the Pontes family on Sunday. The picture at right is Great-Aunt Norma with her sister, Pedro´s grandma. They are great. They are obsessed with embroidering. It is awesome.

I also had lunch on Saturday with some new friends and ended up hanging out with them until late that night. It was nice to just feel like I had a normal social life where I could spend time just talking with people for hours. No picture of that.

Today when I got to the office the lab was locked, so I went outside to wait, and ran into two friends from the lab. We starting talking about raspberries for some reason and, when I was trying to explain what a raspberry was, they took me behind the lab building to a tree which was filled with ripe fruit, which looked like raspberries! I have no idea what they are, but they look and taste just like raspberries, but grow on a tree instead of on a bramble! (If anyone has any idea what those are, please let me know). So I snapped the picture at right while we stood there for a half hour picking and eating these berries. After we cleaned the tree out, we sat down on a curb to look at the view, and we stayed there for another half hour discussing George Bush, the problem of the lack of public transportation and its relationship to the petroleum crisis, and then problems with the monopolies that control the biodeisel industry here. Very interesting and pleasurable morning. Then I went to work.

Grocery stores: not a social scene.

What can I say? I think the shock of being here and making a temporary life is finally settling in, after six days. I have created quite a nice routine: I wake up, shower, make a nice cup of coffee in the coador (paper Melitta filter in a plastic cup-frame that fits nicely over the coffee cup), sit and read the news online, and then get dressed and preened before walking the thirty minutes to the Faculdade. Once there, I log onto my assigned computer in the Geoprocessing Lab (LabGeo) and work on my current project until noon, when Julio, the lab manager, comes and gets me. We hop into his car (small like half the other cars in Campinas--I love that!), whiz a few hundred meters down the road to CEPAGRI (a government research institute) to pick up his friend Ana, and then we whip down the hill in the Fiat to some restaurant off campus (at least, this has happened the last two days, and probably will tomorrow). There we have lunch with some other friends of theirs, a rowdy bunch of mostly-female 30-somethings. After lunch is when the interesting stuff happens, it seems. Yesterday we dropped in on the last 45 minutes of a free Forró class (a kind of countrified salsa dance) where I got to learn Forró and dance with about 10 men who didn´t know how to dance it, either (I am almost convinced that 90% of Brazilian men have no rhythm). Today, in contrast, Ana, another woman, and I dragged Julio shoe-shopping. Julio is not a big shoe fan, but he handled it like a champ. Both of those activities were done by 2pm, then back to the lab, where people work, drink coffee, chat, etc., until about 5pm. I haven´t actually worked until 5pm yet, since I keep getting invited to these research lectures, which are very cool. Yesterday I went to a 4pm guest lecture on ¨The Myths of the Agrarian Reform¨. Right up my alley.

After work, I walk home, make a cold dinner of a sandwich and salad, which is all I can eat after the heavy lunches that are customary here. Dinner also includes one or two glasses of red wine while I check email, surf the internet, write this blog, or read. I am already through three world-class novels, and am getting perhaps a little bored with the solitude of the evening part of the routine after less than a week. A symptom of this might be my frequent trips in the evenings to the grocery store two blocks away to browse the aisles. Literally, I go there to browse the aisles and watch people, maybe buy a baguette or some arrugula. I have been there four times in the last six days. This is pitiful. I think this habit is replacing my Lawrence habit of going for an evening beer at the Pig, where I know I will run into someone I know. Am I hoping I will meet people at the grocery store? Could be, it´s a nice grocery store, lots of nice-looking, mature men wandering the aisles alone with frozen pizzas or packaged sausages in their hands...I am so pitiful.

I walked by a gym today on the way home to check it out. This could be my chance to get out of my grocery store-haunting habit, so I think I am going to join tomorrow and take an evening class or something. I also know, as a friend wrote me today, that with a little more time, I will make friends, have a social life (outside the lab), and forget all about this present loneliness.

I think that is enough for tonight. I will try to remember to bring my camera to work with me tomorrow, so I can post some pictures of Campinas and the lab (exciting!) for you all to see. Also, Friday is September 7, Brazilian Independence Day. I have been invited by a nice grad student named Daniel to have churrasco and beer at his house with his friends. What a relief--I thought I was going to spend Independence Day in the house working at the computer all day! It also looks like I will be spending two or three days next week out in Guaxupé, with the cooperative. This makes me happy.

The Texture of Portuguese, and Other (Almost) Sensational Experiences

Portuguese...Today is my third full day speaking Portuguese and having to actually communicate coherently with it and explain why the hell I am here. Let me first declare that it is not the hell that learning to speak fluent Spanish in Nicaragua was five years ago--probably because I speak Spanish now and it is similar enough to Portuguese that I can recognize words and fake it a bit by changing accent and word endings. Haha. But really, the real declaration here is how unbelievably, incredibly pleasurable it is to speak this language. It has a texture like honey, thick, sticky, and viscous, or, to use a different example, like those little square Brach´s caramels wrapped in clear plastic that you find sometimes in bowls on small tables in the entryways to people´s homes. You pop it in your mouth and it sticks to your teeth, your gums, the roof of your mouth, while it slowly melts away to leave only a sweet caramel aftertaste. I feel like a child playing with this language--I can make it slide out of my nose, dive off the tip of my tongue, or stay puffed up in my cheeks--the sounds one makes with this language are truly liberating!
And I say this not because I am on my second glass of wine here in my room, alone in front of my laptop. No, I say this because it is just so.

So...it was my first day of "work" today. Professor Rubens picked me up in the morning and
took me to FEAGRI (Faculdade de Engenheria Agricola--Faculty of Agricultural Engineering). He introduced me to all the lab-mates (fellow graduate students), and then we sat down with Professor Julieta to talk about my goals and thoughts on what I would do while I was here (this is where I had to justify my existence in Portuguese). Julieta is who I will effectively be working with. She is part of the group that does rural development studies here at UNICAMP.
Julieta is very cool, very critical of "agronomic" thinking, excited about my ideas, and ready, I think, to keep me on task here. She wants a work plan of sorts after I visit COOXUPE (the coffee cooperative) for the first time next week, which will be good, I think. I will go to COOXUPE for a couple of days next week and am very excited about that. For now, I am working this week on a presentation of some preliminary market data, to have something to bring to the cooperative as information.
I went to the bandeijão for lunch with the lab-mates. The bandeijão is a humongous cafeteria-type place that is subsidized by the government, so it is basic food, very cheap, close to a dollar with a student ID. I don´t have one yet, so we borrowed someone else´s so they would let me in. Lots of fun, lots of rice, beans and kovi (greens, very popular). The bandeijão serves 5000 people every day for lunch!
The lab-mates are great! Agmon the lab technician has adopted me as his new project, I think, and I already know his whole family via fotos.
From there I attended a 3 hour lecture on modes of agricultural production in Brazil (focusing on soy and coffee!!) and then Rubens took me home. Leftover feijoada for dinner with a cup of Brazilian red wine in my room. A great first day.
I walked around the neighborhood a bit after I got home, so I feel more comfortable and less isolated than yesterday. I will probably feel even better after I walk to campus tomorrow (if I can find my way!).

See ya...

Feijoada até o final!

That is, feijoada until the end (of me!). I just returned from eating my first feijoada meal. Feijoada, for those of you who have not yet had the pleasure, is a dish of black beans with as many kinds of fatty meat product you can possibly fit in the pot with the beans. Pontes (Pedro´s father) was thinking of my health, perhaps, and prepared a `light` version, with only two kinds of sausage and large chunks of bacon. Yum! So, after watching the tail end of the preparation, I served myself what I thought was a normal-size bowl of it, topped with farofa (manioc flour), a mixture of chopped tomato, onions, lime juice, and bean broth, and pieces of sliced oranges (the lime and oranges cut the heaviness of the dish). About halfway into enjoying it, I was full. I mean full. But I sat there until I finished it, and felt like an overblown feijoada balloon while I sat at the table with the Pontes family conversing, joking, and listening to stories that the grandmother and great-aunt were telling. So now I know that feijoada is deceptive. It was a lovely afternoon, but I don´t think I will eat for a few days!
Tomorrow I go to UNICAMP (University of Campinas) Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, to meet the professors and students that I will be working with.

Welcome to my blog...

Hello from Campinas, Brazil! I got here safely yesterday morning, and right now I feel like I look in the picture at right, just trying to take in what I see, hear, taste, feel, and interact with.

Some first impressions that I wrote down in my journal:
As I sat drinking an espresso and eating a pão de queijo in the airport after arriving, the music playing on the São Paulo airport sound system was a collection of Rod Stewart´s jazz hits (hits?!).
On the bus ride over from São Paulo to Campinas, skyscrapers, smog, small cars...
Incredibly warm people--they embrace you when you meet them as if you were their daughter, their best friend, or a long-lost relative. Generosity, incredible generosity.
It is 70 degrees farenheit here, and everyone keeps saying how hot it is. I think this means that the heat will probably not get anywhere near looking like a Kansas summer (yuck!).

After staying a night and a day with Pedro Pontes´(my Brazilian co-researcher in arms, who is currently in Kansas) family, Pedro´s mom and dad took me to get settled in the pensionato I will be staying in for the next few months. Concecião, the owner, then took me in her car the three blocks to the grocery store! Like I said, generosity. So now I am settled in and looking forward to getting settled into work next week at UNICAMP.