I'm in São Paulo, Brasil for a (far too) short stay. I'm here for meetings with an organization called INMED Partnerships for Children.
I'm here alone, which is unusual for these trips. I usually have another team member with me. Knowing I would coming here alone, I spent a couple weeks trying to turn my awful Spanish and passable French into a rudimentary grip of Portuguese. Or, at least enough Portuguese so that I could greet people warmly, feed myself, get around, and find a bathroom. It's amazing how you can boil interaction down when you have to.
My resultant Portuguese is not terribly effective in complicated situations, but I have found I learned enough to not be lost. I go to the restaurant, and I can ask for coffee with milk, water without bubbles, tomato sauce on my ravioli, and thank the waiter for a delicious meal. I can get in a taxi and be taken to my hotel, and I can tell the driver that I am from Washington, DC, that I like Brasil, and that SP is bloody massive. Well, muito grande, anyway.
I've never been good at languages, but even a few words are enough to be empowering. In the classroom, or with Very Important People, I tend to freeze up, and be embarassed at my silly accent or grammatical mistakes. On my own, it's such an amazing feeling to say something in another language and be understood. More often than not, the person is just excited you've tried (particularly if you're American).
It makes me want to learn more.
But let's get back to what I am doing here, which is far more interesting than my attempts at being a polyglot. I'm finishing up some work researching a number of programs in primary schools in India, China, and Brasil that are funded by the same multinational corporation. The Brazilian partner is the aforementioned INMED.
INMED Brasil undertakes work in the poorest and most underserved parts of the country to improve the health and lives of children and families. The project I've been privileged to observe is called Rede In-Formação,
an effort to provide trained, skilled Master Teachers in every school who can serve as mentors, troubleshooters, and sounding boards for teachers who teach 1-4 grades in the community of Fransisco Morato, one of the many favelas for which cities in Brasil are becoming increasingly notorious.
Francisco Morato doesn't feel like a favela to me, but then, my experience is admittedly pretty limited. There can be no doubt that it is a relatively impoverished community, and I know that violence, crime, drugs, and a dissolving family structure make it a challenging place to work. At the same time, it doesn't have the dire feeling of a shanty town or a series of mud and jute-bag dwellings of the sort one finds in Johannesburg, or Mumbai, or, indeed, Rio de Janeiro.
One of the executives with whom I met today described the fear some have of even going to Francisco Morato to visit, and I have to admit I was a little shocked. As a stranger, maybe I see it differently? Maybe I have gotten desensitized to poverty, after spending time in India, in Africa, in China, in Sri Lanka, in the Mississippi Delta and in Southwest DC. Maybe I am just naive. Or maybe my own background, growing up "working poor," causes me to look past all of this and just relate to the people without noticing it is a place one might feel afraid. I've felt more afraid meeting Ambassadors, but then, maybe that just shows where I come from.
My hotel, the wonderful George V, has CNN International. The other day, during a special on African tourism, they explored the rising demand for "slum tourism." In South Africa and Kenya, residents of some of the poorest neighborhoods in the world have developed tours for curious foreigners looking to gain a window into how the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" live. I took one of these tours, myself, of the townships of Johannesburg, a few years back. I went to see Mandela's house, the churches that housed those who resisted apartheid, and the museums and monuments to those killed in the fight. However, we also went into shanty towns, where a guide took us through the camp, showed us the latrines donated by Oprah Winfrey, and showed us his own home that he shared with his sister and father, who kindly demonstrated the kerosene lamp.
I've kept a journal through all of my travels, and my writing that evening spoke of how uncomfortable I felt, touring this community as if it were a zoo and not the home of people who deserve to live with dignity, not be gawked at. At the same time, the photos I have taken there, and in India, and Niamey, and Hechi, and São Paulo have shown my friends, family, and colleagues a side of life they live in ignorance of. Does that amount to a greater good? I'm not sure. Does the small amount of money that slum tourism can bring to a community make it worthwhile? Again, I don't know.
I go to visit some classrooms tomorrow, which I always get the greatest charge from. I'll write more about INMED and the work they do here tomorrow. And then I will head back to the US, and back to reality, in which I need to visit a dying mother and pick up the ashes of my poor Ritz who I had to put down last week and deal with competing demands for my time from my two jobs and the ongoing attempts to diagnose and treat my sleep and endocrine disorders. Good times. I think I might rather stay here.
Well, I overstate the case. The tot doesn't actually have possession of his gun...yet.
The great state of Illinois (my home state) has issued a Firearms Owner Identification Card...to a 10-month old.
Howard Ludwig, the baby's father, is a columnist with a local paper. His column on the subject is charming and self-deprecating. One almost is able to forget how utterly disturbing the idea of issuing firearms IDs to toddlers is.
I'm not sure how I feel about guns, at times. I've lived abroad, in places where there are few guns, and I rather enjoyed it. At the same time, I'm too much a student of American history to ignore how integral the Second Amendment is to this country.
I also can appreciate the arguments that:
- The Constitution was written before Saturday night specials and automatic weapons were invented
- We don't need to hunt for food any more, when most of us can go down to the Social Safeway and stalk our red meat from behind a couple of Georgetown University students
- The contest between deer and semi-automatic hunting rifle is not exactly a fair fight, so why anyone would derive pleasure from such a hunt is a bit unexplicable
Then there is the premise that a well-armed citizenry/militia is essential for defending ourselves in the event that the government gets a little dictatorial and carried away.
I can see it now. A well-organized group of armed citizens stomping up to the White House and telling Shrub they're taking back the country he has run into the ground.
I'm sure the Secret Service will be interested in their Consitutional Rights. After the citizens are all gunned down and called traitors.
So, one might argue the entire basis of the Second Amendment is a joke.
Which begs the question of why we still need it, then? After all, we as a country also came to the momentous conclusion that African Americans were, in fact, worth more than 3/5 of a person. We are capable of shifting with the times.
I mentioned this last week, but I had to delete it as the coding was messing up and I had no time to redo the post. It's been one of those weeks.
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So, did you hear the one about the judge suing the drycleaners for $67 million?
Roy Pearson, an administrative judge in the District of Columbia, claims that Custom Cleaners lost a pair of trousers after he took them in to be let out in the waist.
So now he is suing for a blockbuster film's opening weekend worth of dinero, after rejecting three attempts by the Chungs to settle for trifling 4-5 digit figures.
Because of his trousers being lost, he had to look like a schmuck his first day of work as a new Very Important Judge. He earned that position after spending decades as a lawyer providing free legal services to impoverished District residents.
The Chungs, who own and operate Custom Cleaners, are Korean immigrants who live in Virginia. So he doesn't care about impoverishing them with outrageous court costs, of course.
He won't give Custom Cleaners his business any longer, so he has to rent a car to get to a dry cleaner every weekend. Apparently the Right to Someone Else Doing Your Laundry is in the Constitution, or something.
Hey, Judge Pearson: maybe walking that overburdensome mile to the next closest cleaner every weekend would mean your trousers wouldn't need to be taken in at all.
ABC News calculated that for $67 million, you could buy 4,115 new pairs of pants at the $800 he claimed they were worth.
The Chungs have received so much public support that their law firm started a legal defense fund.
Incidentally, the District of Columbia's budget and laws are determined by the US Congress, in which DC does not having voting representation. In other words, if you're an American, you help pay this judge's salary. I wonder how much of his time he spends on this case while he is at work?
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