Old And New Friends

There are clear social divisions in Lencois. First, there are the "nativos", people who grew up in the Chapada (this region), work in the hotels, restaurants and as guides, and for the most part are the poorest people in Lencois. Second, you have the Lencois permanent residents who are from Sao Paulo, Rio and in some cases outside of Brazil; in the majority of cases they own and run the hotels, restaurants, stores and trek and tour agencies. On a daily basis I transition between the two groups.

Almost every day I spend several hours with my close friend Katia, her family and friends. When I came in 2006 these were my first friends, women my age and a little younger with families and challenges I’ve never had to face. They continue to be good friends, though Katia’s current pregnancy means our friendship is less about going out at night and more about hanging out during the day. These friendships are the basis of my research, something with which I continue to struggle. They know what my research is about and speak openly with me. Yet I still feel as if I am using them in some way. I think this comes from the fact that now when we talk about their problems, in the back of my mind I am thinking about writing up our conversation in my field notes or what anthropological theory would explain what they are telling me. It is difficult to separate myself from those thoughts. In the evening, I meet up with my friend Cecilia and a group of younger locals who unmarried and without children are able to go out when they leave their waitressing jobs at 11pm. These friendships do not have the depth (yet) of the ones I have with mothers my own age, but they are a lot of fun. I suppose that hanging out with 18-23 year olds could make me feel old, but it doesn’t.

The second group of acquaintances are all associated in some way with the inn I used to work at. They are successful, “alternative”-thinking Lencois residents from around Brazil. They’ve come to Lencois not only to run businesses but also to benefit from the beauty and energy of this place. In many ways I have the most in common with this group of people, enjoy spending time with them and our conversations are very interesting. Yet, the way they distance themselves from the nativos (and speak negatively about them) turns me off from becoming particularly close with any of them. They feel entitled to be in Lencois and yet do not have relationships, beyond work-related ones, with the locals. I sometimes feel like I am in an awkward position, as if I am supposed to joining one side or the other. But thankfully, no one else has made me feel that way and I am becoming more comfortable with the fact that I move between two very different worlds existing in the same, small city.

One last thing. I love that in Lencois you can find yourself standing on the same corner for an hour in the drizzling rain because you, or people you are with, keep running into people and no one is in a hurry to get to their destination. I also like that if you are walking with someone and talking that when it comes time to part ways they will actually continue with you, even if it takes them out of the way, just to continue the conversation. I love that.

Katia and I

Cecilia and I

Dancing Queens

Brunch at the Inn

Festa do São João

I have been in Lençois two weeks; two weeks which have given me plenty to write about. If the first week was marked by my settling in, getting adjusted, etc. this second week has been, and continues to be dominated by the Festa do São João. This yearly week long festival is less about remembering the life of Saint John the Baptist, and much more about celebrating “traditional” life in the rural interior of northeastern Brazil. Streamers and cardboard cutouts decorate the city. Brazilian tourists from Salvador, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro descend on Lençois in their jeans and cowboy boots; clothes that haven’t been worn in this part of the interior for at least 20 years. Everyone is busy preparing traditional dishes using peanuts, cassava, and corn; these staple food items take me on a trip back to Senegal and I am once again reminded of the history between Brazil and Africa.

In the school week leading up to the holiday weekend children dressed as caipiras (country people or cowboys/girls) perform in quadrilhas- akin to square dancing but with every move containing a theatrical aspect. Charming as it appears the storylines do include such crowd favorites as “the conquest (man/boy trying to charm a woman/girl” and “the wife going to get her drunk husband at the bar and carrying him home.” Watching these “dances” being acted out by eight year olds is disconcerting, especially as they are mirrored in the life stories I am hearing from the women I interview. But I digress. When the holiday weekend arrived it became the adults turn to put on their costumes and dance in their quadrilhas and these performances occur in the early part of the evening and range from comedic (men dressed as cowgirls) to quasi-professional renditions of traditional dances.

The quadrilhas are followed by bands that start no earlier than 11pm and play a range of forro music on a 19th century outdoor stage until 3:30am. Vendors line the narrow, cobblestone streets around the stage selling everything from ice cold beers, fruit and cachaça mixes, hot wine with ginger and cinnamon, grilled beef or cheese and savory pastries. Traditional forro is played using an accordion, drum, and triangle; but modern forro has electrified it, includes guitar and has become popular all over the country. Forro reminds me of zydeco music from the southeastern U.S., or vallenato from Colombia. Put simply it is a two-step, but a two-step danced with no space between partners and with tempos ranging from impossibly slow to extremely fast. I love forro. I love backyard parties with a traditional four-man forro band, and I love large outdoor performances with loud cover bands playing the forro hits that I’ve been listening to on my ipod for the last 3 years. But alas, I fear that my forro dancing ability leaves a lot to be desired. The overachiever in me isn’t satisfied with hearing, “You dance forro very well for a gringa.” My main problem lies in this- every man has a different style, a different jeito (way) of dancing forro. I have one friend who insists on only dancing with the same two partners to avoid the problem of different dancing styles; I like to dance too much to wait to dance only with people I’ve danced with before. Locals dance forro very simply, one-two, one-two, side to side at different speeds to match the music, and that I manage quite well. Ironically the better dancers are from outside of the interior of Brazil and they switch up the tempos and rhythms within a dance quite frequently. As I am not yet fully accustomed to dancing with no breathing room between partners, never mind being lead through more complicated variations of the basic steps, I am sure I am a comedic sight on the dance floor. Oh well; in an effort to learn I have put in solid hours of practice staying out until 3:30am for the last four nights (hahaha). There are three more nights of the festa left and I intend to spend each of those nights mastering my forro skills. I start every evening exhausted but somewhere in the middle as I watch couples swirling around me, I am so content that I don’t feel tired, just inexplicably happy.

One town square decorated for the holidy.

Children´s Qadrilha

Cecilia and I posing with the "forro band."

Forro Party

My friends dancing forro.

Minha Casinha

View from apartment (above); The Kitchen

Eating/Working Area

The Bedroom

The French doors in the bedroom.

Has it really only been four days since I arrived in Lencois? I am experiencing the traveler’s time warp- time seems to be flying by and yet four days ago seems like a lifetime. When I think that this time last week I was leaving Maine and on my way to Boston, well then that adds to surreality of the week. In the last few days I have completed all the things that one does when rediscovering a place and simultaneously making themselves at home. In my case, that meant settling into my cute little apartment, going to the market, bathing in the wonderfully cold waters of the Rio Serrano, visiting friends and relatives of friends, having my first shot of cachaca, and dancing my first forro under the stars.

It feels strange having my own place; I am so used to the hustle and bustle of the inn or my friends’ houses that having a quiet space of my own throws me off a bit. Though I completely acknowledge that is what I need to actually get some work done on my thesis. The apartment is on the third floor of a house that is on the outskirts of the town. The stairs are not yet complete so I climb three wooden ladders to reach the apartment; a little tricky but nothing I can’t handle. The apartment is small but the two sets of French doors opening to a beautiful view of the mountains makes up for the space (not that I need anymore space). My kitchen table/work area is positioned alongside one set of French doors, so that when I sit at it in the morning eating my breakfast (papaya, mango and banana salad) I feel as though I am outside. It is winter here right now, which mean temperatures dip into the 60’s and 70’s at night, and in the morning it stays cloudy and cool until the sun breaks through at mid day. Even with doors and windows closed the thin brick walls do nothing to fliter out the sounds around me, roosters crowing in the morning, crickets and frogs at night, people awake and up much earlier than I, and the somewhat distant sounds of people reveling in the town center at the start of the Festa de São João. I can hear the river when the doors are open and it tempts me to leave my work behind, walk up the mountain 20 minutes and go for a swim. This is quickly returning to be my afternoon ritual, along with everyone else in town with an hour to spare. That is one of the things I enjoy the most about Lencois, people here appreciate and enjoy the natural beauty around them. I’ve been in so many places where locals do not frequent the places that tourists themselves travel hundreds of miles to vist, thus to be in a place where people go to the river every day is very refreshing (no pun intended).

Today the cowboys are coming to town, literally, and so I’m going to a potluck lunch and then spend the day listening to Brazilian cowboy music, drinking cervesa on the praça with a couple of friends, and finding peace and happiness in a simple, Sunday afternoon.

Brazilian Homecoming

My trip to Brazil was uneventful but a tad bit exhausting. I somehow managed to only have 45 minutes between each of my flights and considering they were all on the late side, I did my fair share of terminal running (I knew there was a reason that lack of backpack space forced me to wear my running shoes to travel). I had a couple of interesting row partners. First, a Spanish guy who engaged me in conversation in Spanish when really I should have been avoiding speaking the language that has recently corrupted my Portuguese (I of course found out at the end of the flight that he lives in the United States and speaks perfectly fine English and only pretended not to because he “misses” speaking Spanish, ayaya). On my 9-hour red-eye flight, I found myself sandwiched between a middle-aged man and a young capoerista. Both came close to leaning their heads on my shoulders as they slept soundly the entire flight. I, on the other hand, forced myself to stay awake long enough to watch “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” which turned me into one of those people that laughs on flights when everyone else is trying to sleep. Oops.

Fast-forward 3 flights and 24 hours later and I landed in Salvador de Bahia, greeted by my friend Adriane who swept me off into the land of amazing hosting abilities. Before I knew it my bags were off my back, I was well fed, bathed and sitting on the couch forcing myself to stay awake until 8pm, which I deemed a safe hour to go to bed and not wake up in the middle of the night wide awake. Perhaps not a glorious, rock star reentry into Brazil, but let’s face it when you are so tired that you are unable to string together logical sentences in your native language, nevermind a language you haven’t spoken on a daily basis for two years, resigning yourself to staying in and watching tv for a couple of hours isn’t such a bad idea.

After sleeping 10 hours straight I got up to catch an early bus to Lencois. During the 6 hour drive I still managed to sleep on-and-off but when I was awake I noted that everything was a lot greener than I remembered. I’m not sure of this is due to my new life in the desert or the fact that I’ve come here previously during drier months. In any case, the green, lush landscape was a nice surprise. I will admit that when the bus turned onto the side road to Lencois I started feeling nervous. What if it wasn’t like I remembered? What if I wasn’t as happy there? What if my research failed and I had to change my entire dissertation project? As my nervousness threatened to turn into panic, the bus turned the final bend into the town and there Lencois was welcoming me once again. It is amazing how a place you’ve been to three times before can still strike you by its awe-inspiring beauty. Colorful houses nestled into green rolling hills, the Rio Serrano rushing through the center of town and the peaceful energy that comes from a place where no one is hurrying to get anywhere. My nerves disappeared, along with panic about my research; instead I wished I had come sooner and that I wouldn’t have to leave. Perhaps premature thinking, and I’m sure it will change several times in the next 2 months, but I prefer “I don’t want to leave” to “should I be here?” any day.

My friend Chris, the inn owner, was there to greet me at the bus stop and drive my stuff and I to his inn. There I was greeted by the same staff members who were working there when I left and escorted to one of the many rooms I had stayed in when I lived there in 2006. I was overwhelmed with an excitement to be back that I’d been waiting to hit me on the journey to Brazil, on my arrival in Salvador, and on the trip to Lencois. But it was in Lencois, when left alone in my room, that the urge to yell “Woohoo!” finally hit me. As I walked around town that afternoon it appeared that nothing had changed- some places had closed, some had opened. The town is busy preparing itself for the Festa de São João (the biggest holiday in northeastern Brazil) and so there was a lot of bustling about. I’m glad I will have ten days to get comfortable before people pour into town for the festivities. I’ll close out by saying that I spent the rest of my first day with my close friend Katia (who you will be hearing much more about) and her family, which was the final step in my [Brazilian] homecoming.

Maine is Where The Heart Is

I’m writing this entry from the lovely city of Boston where I await the start of my long (48 hour) trip to Lençois, Bahia, Brazil. It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting lakeside in Maine….Wait it was only yesterday. Yes, 17 days in Maine was exactly what I needed to catch up on sleep, do some creative writing (and some not-so-creative proposal writing) and really think about my thesis and what I hope to accomplish in Brazil. I of course left plenty of time for running, kayaking, yoga and gardening. One would think that endless days of solitude would be challenging for an extrovert like me, but surprisingly it was wonderfully refreshing to be only accountable to my own whims and fancy. Truth be told I was actually only alone 9 out of 17 days. My parents bookended the weeks when they dropped me off and picked me up, and I was joined for the middle weekend by my dear friends Theresa, Matthew, Angela and my godson Quinten. When you have such an amazing place at your disposal it’s best to share it as much as possible with the people you love! All that said, I’m glad I took that time “off” instead of going directly to Brazil when the summer ended. I feel completed rested, invigorated and ready to go. Looking at the clock now I actually need to go! So I will leave my other thoughts for another entry. Hope your summer is beautiful so far!