Saturday, November 17, 2007

80s Night last night


Here are some pictures of a night on the town last night--we enjoyed the Beer Tower, and then went to Barril da Mafia, where it was 80s Night, with a live band of mostly female musicians performing impressively faithful renditions of all your favorite songs by Bat Benatar, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Morissey, and many more. Lots of fun...

Sunday, November 4, 2007

(more) Culture Shock

I am going to vent for a moment. Keep in mind as you read that I am merely venting, and you should not take it seriously.

It is called ongoing culture shock. I am past the initial stages of it, but these later stages are not any easier. And I think I am coming to terms (again) with the fact that I cannot escape being a foreigner here. No matter what, I will not blend in. And people will always assume I don´t understand anything (even after having conversed with me for 20 minutes!) or will be so nice as to repeat everything they say to me at least three times, or will solicitously ask me questions at the speed of a turtle without waiting for the answer. Even better, when they first meet me, will ask the Brazilian friend that I am with, ¨Where is she from?¨. I then answer. They then ask my Brazilian friend, ¨How long will she be here?¨or ¨Who is she studying with?¨, or some similar question. I then answer, and then they continue to ask the other person questions about me while I stand there, until I get frustrated and say something like, ¨Look, you can ask me directly¨ or something more or less direct, depending on if they are drunk or not.

The point is, after almost three months of being here, I have great friends, people who communicate with me, make jokes, confide in me, and who listen. But I also have these other encounters, ceaselessly. I don´t remember this happening so much in Nicaragua. Is there a reason why? Perhaps because Nicaragua has a history of foreign solidarity workers living and working there since the early 1980s, while Campinas doesn´t have tourism, solidarity, or anything that would give people substantial experience with foreigners. That theory makes sense, actually, given that people are always flabbergasted when they learn that my university actually offers Portuguese classes; their reaction is always shock that people would actually want to learn Portuguese, so I understand their surprise at my understanding.

But it doesn´t make it any easier. It could be an ego thing, really. I consider myself a mature, adult woman who has cultivated communication skills over a lifetime of 30 (uh...31) years, and to be spoken to like a child, to be denied the very opportunity of engaging in conversations that involve the expression of subtle, abstract ideas, this challenges that self-image. I don´t like that. But I am dealing with it, and learning to smile rather than give in to the urge to prove to everyone I meet that I have some modicum of intelligence hiding behind my foreigner´s face.

A little honest self-reflection is good for a blog, right? I will get back to the fluff in the next post...
H.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Rain, Research, and Hourly Motels

Rain...
It is raining here in Campinas, which is a long-awaited respite from the humid heat we were having, and is definitely something to be appreciated as we enter Summer on this side of the globe. When I say respite, it is important to remember that southern Brazil depends heavily on agriculture, and some areas were 40, 50, or even 75 days without rain. This is during a season whose brief rain storms are what stimulate the flowering of the coffee bushes that cover the hillsides in northern São Paulo or southern Minas Gerais. So, needless to say, farmers both small and large were getting nervous, anxious, and this was evident on my visits to them in the last month. This past week, after the rains finally arrived, the feeling was definitely different, although not totally. The problem with southern Brazilian rain is that it is ironically localized. Localized meaning that, for instance, we can experience a heavy rainstorm where I live in Barão Geraldo, a outlying district of the city of Campinas, while the center of Campinas, not more than 17 kilometers away, will not feel a drop of that storm. Ironic meaning that, as it happened last week when I was in southern Minas doing interviews with farmers, it can rain in the city where the cooperative office is, but coffee farmers 5 kilometers away will not see any rain. That, to me, brings to mind the Depeche Mode song that has the verse ´God has a sick sense of humour´, since the people that need the rain are the rural farmers, and the city with all its pavement and paving stones, cannot even absorb the water that falls! But that is agriculture, isn´t it? To be expected. (Does anyone happen to remember the name of that song? Cristin?)
So besides experiencing rain, I have been pretty busy (although that would not seem obvious given my failure to post anything to this blog). Time is simply flying. I have exactly five weeks left here before I leave, and this makes me feel anxious when I think about it. I have been focusing pretty much entirely on getting through the different research activities that I and Cooxupé set out for me. I spent about three weeks visiting different núcleos (cooperative satellite offices), before Chris, my advisor from Kansas, came for a visit to Campinas to meet with researchers here about his own research. It was an incredibly fun visit, and a really nice temporal oasis of common language, context and culture for a few days, completely out of spatial context. And, as Chris noted while he was here, not one night passed without a bit of beer.

My goal last week after Chris left was to get started on my questionnaires, which I had spent about a month writing, rewriting, getting suggestions, and making more changes before I brought it to the cooperative núcleo in Monte Santo, where the cooperative agronomists and agricultural technicians tore it apart again. I thought I would field test the questionnaire on Wednesday and Thursday, but once I sat down with the núcleo manager and the agronomists, the process of choosing a 20% sample of farmers from a list of 150 farmers that qualify for fairtrade certification turned into a two-day process. Why? Because these things take place within a context of social relations, right? The agronomists know all these farmers and, although we were all conscious of the goal of getting a stratified, geographically distributed sample of farmers for the study, the end result was NOT a random sample by any means. Comments such as the following helped to determine the final sample: "Oh, he is really old and tends to ramble, so it won't be a good interview"; "This guy is married to that guy's sister and they actually live on the same farm"; "He won't know what you are talking about when you ask about legal reserves". This last comment I had to negotiate, because in my study, it means something when the farmer cannot talk about a legal reserve on his farm, that is required by law. But the point is that my perception of this community of farmers meant nothing by itself, and had to incorporate the perception of the technicians that actually are immersed in it. For them, a random sample is impossible given the realities of the people and place, and their relationship with it. In the end, I will now forever question what it means when a study says it used a random sample. After the two days it took to come up with an acceptable sample of farmers, I finally field tested the questionnaire on Friday. I am convinced that the Portuguese I speak is a completely different language than the Portuguese they speak. So now I am spending today rewriting the questionnaire again, to make it more comprehensible to the farmers!

Another interesting impression of life here in Barão Geraldo: Barão Geraldo can be characterized as a university city; it is legally part of Campinas, but is separate, its own little world complete with everything. University students (both undergraduate and undergraduate) generally live either in Repúblicas (shared houses or apartments with 2-4 students per room), the Moradia (subsidized student housing complex, with 4 students per room) or with their parents. So, of course, the first question that came to my mind once I realized this about a month ago, was, where do people have sex? Definitely not in their parents' homes. And if they are in the Repùblicas or Moradias, do they simply do what they want and turn a blind eye when their roommates have guests in their beds? I finally got the real answer: hourly motels. It is a way of life here. There are quantities of them available whenever you need them and, from what I am told, they are accessible to student incomes. It takes away some of the spontaneity of sex, but with the interesting accessories available in the motel rooms, like jacuzzis and mirrored ceilings, it might actually add something to sex that you might not get regularly otherwise.

I will write more this week, promise!
Love from Campinas...