Fortaleza, Brazil

I woke up this morning and realized that it was December 16 and that I have only 4 days left in Brazil. I’ve been traveling since December 5, which has helped the time to pass quickly. I went with Meggie, Brianne, and Erin to Fortaleza, a city in the North of Brazil in the state of Ceará from December 5-10. We left late on the 5^th after Meggie got out of class, but the flight was delayed and we arrived at 12:15AM, nearly 2 hours later than anticipated. We weren’t sure what we were going to do when we got there or where we were going to stay because we were all semi-counting on a contact that Erin made through her host mom. (The lady’s name is Carine and is a Mary Kay saleswoman who lives in Fortaleza and promised to set us up with a place to stay.) Carine called while we were waiting out the delays in the Salvador airport and offered to pick us up and take us to the hotel. We thanked her and told her to expect us at midnight, but when we got there she wasn’t there and didn’t answer her house or cell phone. After waiting half an hour we decided to find a place ourselves and called around a few hostels until we found room for 4 at a decent price. We got our first glimpse of Fortaleza through the taxi windows and we commented first on its over-the-top Christmas decorations (in one plaza they made a giant Christmas tree out of white hammocks), and then on the prostitutes lined up on the street, where coincidentally, the taxi stopped to let us out at the hotel. (We read in the tour book that it was located in the prime night-life spot but we weren’t exactly expecting the womanly display.) We got two rooms for $20 a piece, including breakfast (which is much more expensive than we had hoped).

In the morning Carine called and apologized for having missed our calls the night before and came to pick us up and take us to the other hotel. Meggie and Bri were on a tight budget so although Carine secured reservations at a 4 star hotel for the same price as the first place, we decided to keep looking and ended up at an apartment with a kitchen and two bathrooms for $6.75/day. We went to the grocery store and bought bread, eggs, turkey, wheat bread, water, and fruit, which was to be our sustenance for the next four days. That afternoon we went to the beach (Praia do Futuro) for a few hours until it started to get dark. The beach was pretty, but the waves were really too strong to swim in. On the bus ride we passed by a favela which I wish I had been able to get a picture of because the snow of trash on the hillside by it was striking. When we got back we made a reservation for an excursion on Friday morning and went to the artesian fair near our apartment where everyone found some great buys and ended up spending the money we saved on the cheap, smelly apartment.

We left for the excursion Friday at 7 AM and went to Morro Branco, Praia das Fontes, Centro das Rendeiras and Canoa Quebrada. At Moro Branco we walked through a labyrinth of sand dunes and then took a sand boogie ride to a fountain of youth (Praia das Fontes) and a sweet water lagoon where we swam to cool down. In the sand dunes we saw 12 different tones of natural sand which the natives use to make artwork. A little after mid-day we left for Canoa Quebrada where we spent the next 3 hours on the beach and I tried a acerola smoothie (acerola is a fruit similar to a cherry). We got back to the apartment around 6:30 PM and stayed in for the night talking and doing crossword puzzles. (The girls have awakened a new passion for crossword puzzles in me. Maybe after some practice I’ll be able to compete with Grandma and Grandpa Hoza.)

Saturday we went to the central market where we found some great deals on Christmas gifts and souvenirs. Erin picked out two paintings but didn’t have enough cash to buy them on the spot so we went back to the apartment to get more money and grab a bit to eat, then returned to the market briefly to get the paintings. We walked over to the cultural center near by and went through the modern art museum and watched a film (The Waitress) at the theater to help pass the time before dinner. (Carine had offered to pick us up at 6 and take us to dinner and we were eagerly anticipating a solid meal because boiled eggs and fruit doesn’t hold you very long.) She ended up picking us up around 7 and taking us to a mall where her father owns a shop. (I failed to mention earlier that she is the PERFECT Mary Kaye representative. She is fair skinned with strawberry blond hair and dresses in pink and heels.) We met her son, niece, and empregada and toured the entire mall before she led us to the food court and, at long last, we ate. Carine is 35 and clearly infatuated with the States. She is going to the Mary Kaye convention in Dallas next month and I told her to get in touch with me if she wants to travel to Houston or New Orleans.

Sunday we went to the beach with Carine and her son. Erin and I left around 12:30 because the sun was too strong and Erin hurt her shoulder when one of the waves knocked into her. Meggie and Bri stayed a few more hours and met up with us around 3. We decided to wander around the city a bit and find some ice cream. We ended up buying a carton of ice cream and splitting it (I opted out for yogurt), then we walked along the beach until nightfall.

Early Monday morning, Carine picked us up and took us to the airport and after more delays we reached home around 3. It was a brief stop home for me because Erin and I left for Belo Horizonte the next day. I had just enough time to unpack, repack, answer a few e-mails, and say goodbye to a few friends heading home.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I thought I'd share this video to give you an idea of the unconventionality of my Thanksgiving experience. It was bizarre to say the least. (Imagine night club music, an assortment of traditional American and Brazilian dishes, and cheesy decorations.)

I was supposed to have a presentation during my 7:OO AM Health seminar, but protesters barricaded the entrance to the university so class was canceled.

My Spanish professor decided that it would be the last day of class and between winks told us that we could come because technically there is still class, but that the students have collectively decided not to... She also canceled the final exam.

In the afternoon I had to give my final Portuguese presentation in front of all 4 classes. We sat through 4.5 hours of presentations before we were liberated to go have our Thanksgiving dinner. I made my Grandma's cornbread stuffing and it was a huge hit. Everyone complemented it so props to Mom for getting me the recipe. Tell Grandma that it was a success!

Updates from the last time I posted are coming, but I want to write about a few recent events now why they are still fresh in my head.

CAASAH-SHOT AND BITTEN

Monday got off to a bit of a rough start because I had been up late working on a paper the night before and I was so occupied finishing it that morning, that I didn’t remember about my 8:50 class until 8:40. (opps!) Somehow I cut the 40 minute walk in half and got there at 9:05 without much damage. (It was my Spanish class which generally starts 10-15 minutes late anyway.) Then after lunch I went to CAASAH, where I do my volunteer work with kids with HIV. The past few weeks I’ve seen a lot of improvements in the conditions there, but Monday was less than a positive experience. I was playing Frisbee with some kids in the playground when two of the boys got into a fight. Erique threw a rock at Mateos who responded by grabbing a huge chunk of concrete. It was easy to see where that was going so I intervened. Somewhere in the process of prying the concrete chunk from his hand and restraining him I got bit first timidly on the wrist, then forcefully on my thigh. I was alarmed at first because my thigh throbbed a good bit and I knew that if he broke the skin and had any sort of infection in his mouth, there was a chance that the virus could be transferred. I shrugged it off, thinking that there wasn’t much chance that he would have broken the skin through my jeans. After giving him a good talking to about the inappropriateness of his behavior, I moved to the baby room to cool down a bit. While I was holding one of the babies João, who I normally consider to be well-behaved, came in and started spraying water from the hose in the diaper changing room. He turns and shoots me point blank in the crotch and side. When I got home Conchita just stared at me standing in the doorway with the front of pants still soaked. It turned out to be an amusing story in retrospect, but at the time it was a bit defeating. I took a look at the bite and sprayed it with an antiseptic when I got home. Though it was swollen and red, the spray didn’t even sting so that assured me that the skin wasn’t broken. What little squirts…

(P.S. I'm not trying to show-off my leg in this picture, but I couldn't get the bite to get into focus any other way.)

PEDRA GRANDE- BLOOD AND FECES COLLECTIONS

Yesterday I went back with my class to the community, Pedra Grande, where I am doing the project from my honor’s thesis. It was a national holiday so all classes were cancelled and we took advantage of the free day… ALL of the free day in fact. (I left at 6:00AM and didn’t get back home until 10:00PM.) We learned that there is a back road that we can take to reach the community, which was great news because otherwise we would have had to carry across all our supplies across that log bridge. We had requested the health department to bring 4 chairs and 2 tables for us to use, but it turned out that the health department only brought one school desk and we had to scrounge up another table and some chairs from the community. It was a challenging request because many of the houses don’t have any furniture, but one lady offered her new kitchen table and several of the kids ran home and brought us a stool or a lawn chair. We set up a tent for the blood collections and used the big table to organize our supplies. We had 1 person recording the persons name and age and assigning an identification number (we labeled all the tubes and slides by an identification number and initials), 2 people preparing the supplies, 3 people drawing blood, 1-2 people attending to the patient after the collection (applying the bandaid, giving candy to the kids), 2 people making and labeling the slides (after the collection we put a drop of blood on each slide and extended it by running another slide at 45 degree angle along its entire length), 1-2 people organizing the people waiting, and 2 people collecting the feces. It took us about 4-4.5 hours to finish the collections and at the end of the day we had samples from 137 of 156 members of the community.

I did a bit of everything. One minute I was collecting blood, then distracting all the kids hovering around a screaming baby by taking their pictures with my digital camera, then making a slide or homogenizing the blood sample. We had to work fluidly because we were in a wide open environment where there isn’t the physical infrastructure to be able to separate those waiting their turn, those in the collection, and those who have already collected. Kids hovered around their friend during the collection, nervous little ones watched the process in horror, and kids climbed trees and ran around with the collection tube in hand. All and all, we came out well. When we got back to the lab in Salvador around 5:30PM, we organized all the samples and started running tests. Luckily only one mislabeled sample turned up. We first organized all the samples sequentially, then started running the tubes through an automated machine that screens for basic indicators of malnutrition and disease. After analyzing the results we identified the individuals whose slides we needed to examine, and tinted those slides. We finished around 9:30 PM and refrigerated all the samples neatly organized and labeled. Next week we are going to come in to look at the slides and exam the feces samples.

Look at the past 3 posts because I've added new photos!

On October 20 I went with my Anemia class to a small community called Pedra Grande in the Interior. The driver picked us up at 6AM and we spent three hours in route, plus a half hour break to eat breakfast. To reach the community we had to literally pull off the road in the middle of nowhere, walk about 20 minutes through the brush, and cross a river by way of a narrow tree trunk. We never would have found the place if we hadn’t first picked up a representative of the health department from a town nearby.

The community is a quilobolo, or a hide-away community founded by runaway slaves. It was immediately obvious upon arrival that we were dealing with an extremely impoverished and isolated population. The houses were made of mud bricks and sticks, the children ran around barefoot with dirty, bloated bodies and chickens roamed freely from the brush to the kitchen.

In teams of two we did house visits and administered our questionnaires that inquired about basic sanitation, dietary habits, and if anyone in the household showed symptoms of anemia.

After we finished the house visits we gathered everyone together and explained the project that we wanted to do. We are returning next Friday to take blood and feces samples, in subsequent visits we will do educational activities/games that address what we deem to be the principal health problems of the community, and in the final visit we will have a health fair with 2 doctors and representatives from the health department.

I’ve officially decided to abandon my research attempts with the Institute of Collective Health and instead use the data from this project. I spoke with my professor here and she is very supportive, but I’m still waiting for the okay from the home base at Tulane. I want to study the link between intestinal worms and anemia in Pedra Grande and discuss the social-historic conditions of the community that makes it susceptible to this type of anemia.

I’ve also learned how to draw blood. Within class we’ve practiced on each other and I was the first to try. Since then, I worked one morning in the lab and got 2 hours of practice!

I have Internet again! Updates coming soon.... This photo is from last weekend in Porto Seguro.

I am well overdue for an update. Sorry for the negligence. My dad mailed my charger about three weeks ago, but there was a strike in the postal services and it still hasn't arrived. Since I last wrote:

-I met with Barreto (on September 19th) and talked to him about my hopes to collaborate on a research project or collect my own data independently (but with his guidance) over either HIV or TB Salvador. He didn't make the conversation easy for me, but in the end he put me in contact with the director of a TB research project and gave me a copy of the proposal to read over. (I suppose that I was expecting him to be dazzled by my persistence and shower me with provocative ideas and encouragement. Instead he indirectly pointed out my lack of experience and direction, which was fair, but a girl's got to start somewhere. I'm in Brazil now and trained or not, I want to try to do and see what I can. ) The following Monday I met Susan, the project director, and we decided that it would be most beneficial for me to work on the questionnaires and interviews. She e-mailed me a copy of the questionnaires (but I never received them) and put me on the mailing list for Public Health seminars and announcements for the institute. On October 5 I went to a seminar on child consumption of medication and talked to Barreto afterward. I let him know that I never received the questionnaires and he explained to me that Susan hurt her ankle and has been out of the office. He introduced me to some other members of the team and had them re-send the questionnaires. Wednesday of last week I went to a meeting where the questionnaires were edited and finalized. I don't know when we will actually begin to administer them, but I think I've finally made myself inside the loop.

-Capoeira is going well. I've started going 3-4 times a week and I'm actually enjoying it now. When I go on Mondays or Wednesdays I see other students from my program and that helps me feel less incompetent. A huge group of students from California started about 3 weeks ago and they make me look like a pro, but I'm trying not to let it get to my head. ;o)

-Everything with CAASAH (the home I go to for carriers of HIV) is fine. I've bought 3 pairs of tennis shoes over the past month, which was probably a bad idea but when I see a little kid running around with gashes on their feet or NOT running around BECAUSE they have gashes on their feet, I tend to forget that if you give one child a pair of shoes there will be 27 others in line behind him with their precious little hands outstretched and pouty lips. I am bothered by the lack of sanitation and discipline, so I'm going to sit down with the director next Monday. I've already spoken to Flavia, an advisor at CIEE, because I want to know if the children don't have soap, shoes, or bathrooms accessible due to lack or resources or because of negligence. If it is resources, Brianne and I have been discussing some ways to raise money. Brianne is from Kansas City and as part of her study abroad scholarship is required to do a community project when she gets back incorporating elements of Brazilian culture. She is planning on putting on a Brazilian cultural fair for children in April (possibly annually) and she said she would be willing to set aside some of the funding for an institution like CAASAH. I'm not convinced that that sort of sponsorship is necessarily the best course of action, but it's at least one idea. I'd like to learn more about how exactly CAASAH is funded and managed, and perhaps some of the concepts from the social service class will help me to identify what the issue actually is and if there is a self-sustainable solution. Other CAASAH observations:
*Two weeks ago while I was there one of the nurses was literally throwing the children around and hitting them with a tree branch.
*My soccer ball was lost, but I've been bringing the Frisbee and it's been a huge hit.
*CIEE put on an event at CAASAH on September 21 with about 12 stations with different activities and prizes. At the end we hand out snacks and it really shook me to see 5-9 year old kids carefully wrapping up the packages of cookies and crackers and hiding them in their respective hiding places (behind a bush, on top of a cabinet, in a crack in the wall) so that they could have something to bring with them to school the next week.

-On September 23rd I went to Praia do Flamengo to have lunch and go to the beach with my art teacher's daughter, Julia. Julia is studying law at Catolica and speaks English impressively well for never having been to the US. I went with Kristina and Bethany by bus, which took about 1.5 hours. When I got with the gates of their condominium I felt like I had stepped into suburban America. The houses had little yards and gardens and everyone had a car parked out front. (My teacher is clearly well off.) We walked to the beach behind the condo and laid out/talked until lunch time. Julia's mom made feijão (a bean dish) and fresh salad. After lunch we watched some of the soccer game and caught a ride back to Garcia with Julia's aunt and uncle. It's a good thing that we didn't take a bus because traffic was terrible and the buses were all jammed with people coming back from the beaches after a long day of sun and beer. Bethany and her boyfriend are staying at a condo owned by Julia's uncle right now and I'm planning on meeting up with them there tomorrow morning with Michelle.

-On September 26 I went to a theater performance with CIEE called A Geladeira (the refrigerator) at Teatro Vila Velha. We walked into the theater to find the audience seats lining the perimeter of the stage. Clothing was hanging from hangers on the ceiling and thrown about on the floor. A bald man, barefoot and wearing a purple cotton dress, walked around the stage carrying a stereo playing music. It was a bit of an absurd performance and I had trouble identifying what the message of the writer was, so I won't spend anymore time writing about it. We went to dinner afterwards, which made up for the theater.

-On September 29th I went with Brianne, Maggie, and Bethany to Jacuípe. It took us 3 hours to get there, but it is my favorite beach so far (except for Rio of course). We were right where the Jacuípe River meets the ocean. We entertained ourselves by swimming upstream, then floating down the current and watching the jet skis. It was fairly unpopulated, had few vendors, and was clean- all welcome changes. For safety reasons we stayed near a bar, because Bri and Maggie are both blonde and got robbed the weekend before.

-On October 4 I saw Seu Jorge in concert! It was amazing. I was front row, precisely in the center and I only paid $20 for the tickets. Seu Jorge is one of my favorite artists from Brazil and I almost peed my pants when I found out he was coming. The concert surprised me a bit because I had him pegged as the stoic- classy type, but oh no, this was a show. His 5-6 year old daughter came on stage to introduce him and all his instrumentalists and backup singers came on dressed up as different kinds of workers (i.e. a street cleaner, a security guard, a doctor, a butcher, a farmer, etc.) Seu Jorge came on as a police officer and danced without reservation. He sang a lot of songs from his new album (which I bought after the concert for $5) and about 4 from the album that I have. At the end of the concert the audience went crazy and demanded an encore. We pushed up against the stage and I could have literally reached out and touched him. My favorite part was when we picked up one of the apples used as a prop and ate in the middle of one of the songs during the encore. A man after my own heart...

-Last Friday was a national holiday and also Dia das Crianças (children's day). I went out with Isa, Luciana, and Conchita to Parque Pituaçu to see a concert in the park but it turned out we went to the wrong park, so after walking around a bit we went over to Parque da Cidade just in time to see the Bahian orquestra play. It was a beautiful day and children were EVERYWHERE. Children's day is like a mini Christmas and all the kids get presents/candy/etc. We went to lunch at a Bahian restaurant where I ate too much, but enjoyed myself thoroughly. It was the first time that I had been out with all 3 of them at the same time.

Okay, I will stop there because I know I've already tested your endurance and patience writing this much. Please drop me a line and let me know how things are. I've been so disconnected the last month and half since my computer went out.