On an isolated peninsula in Brazil, where the Atlantic winds blow warm over wooden fishing boats, 2,500 inhabitants are eagerly anticipating the wonders of the modern Internet. They have formed a buying cooperative, ordered an Internet satellite dish (with help from DK readers), and are preparing a room where new computers will be installed. By the fifteenth of September, if the satellite company performs as promised, these Indians, who never before touched keyboards before, will nonetheless begin sending messages by MSN and Yahoo. It's an aspiration that makes me shiver with pleasure. I've only been participating with this community a month or so but the plans we've made together seem about to come to fruition.
Because there are no telephone lines on the peninsula and cellular phone connections are as expensive as they are spotty, and pay phone cards as exhausted as soon they are inserted in the phone booths, Internet access is a financial
and practical necessity for the peninsula's inhabitants. It allows them to communicate with the world in the less expensive and more efficient ways that the rest of us take for granted.
Pelé and I are rolling the dice, betting that the community's demonstrated need for communication and PC-literacy will be matched by their ability to pay enough hourly to support the cost of their Internet access. (If readers would like to make a contribution to see this succeed, please go to PayPal.Com and make a contribution to the BrazilianPeninsulaProject@Yahoo.Com.)
I have been living in the bosom of a loving Afro-Brazilian Indian family, a father, mother, and four children present, aged 9 to 21 (if memory serves me correctly). On Tuesday I awoke at six in the morning and found Vanda (mother) in the kitchen patio, shelling a five gallon pail of fresh shrimp that Leo (oldest boy) had brought in on the afternoon before. Vanda is a worker, not a talker, but I asked her about her life and she began to describe the many challenges that she and Pelé (her husband) had overcome. She described how they had worked together, intially selling food from tents while buying the property and building the buildings that now are their restaurant and dancehall.
The building itself bespeaks the gradual efforts, with its many overlapping roofs protecting the individual rooms that were addeed as new activities required and money permitted. The two little girls share a room within the main building while the father and mother share a one-room hut, and each of the oldest young men has a hut of his own. All face a spacious inner patio bounded on one side by the outdoor kitchen where food is prepared for the restaurant, and opening into large garden where Vanda plants cilantro, mint, scallions, onions and even cotton, along with Brazilian vegetables for which Americans have no names. While it is delightful merely to savor the aroma of the shrimp "moqueca" (gumbo), yet actually to savor it is orgasmic; it should last forever. I recommend that if readers ever decide to do volunteer work, they site their projects, as I have, in the best local restaurant with the most able of cooks.
By seven o'clock in the morning the entire family is in the patio, and I with them, each of us with a bowl of fresh shrimp to be shucked and another full of succulent pink flesh of fresh shrimp ready to be sold. They are surprised that an American lawyer knows how to shuck shrimp, but I explain that I learned the skill in the seafood restaurants where I worked as a teenager. In those restaurants, the pungent smells of shrimp scampi and stuffed haddock were intertwined with those of backed potatoes and clam chowder. Only in Brazil, on this morning, do I identify the one particular odor that infused my clothes as I walked home in total darkness from the seafood restaurants where I washed dishes as a teenager. I reeked of fresh shrimp, just as this kitchen reeks now, on the east coast of Brazil.
There is much laughter and light-hearted banter in this family. In my family, there was laughter as well, but also alcoholism and violence. I never learned to laugh or joke; I learned to be deadly serious, anticipating the next attack and planning to fight or flee. I never learned to frolic. Even now, in the bossom of Pelé's family, it's hard for me to engage in the pillow fights and games of tag that are so frequent. If I try, sometimes I lose myself in a moment of un-self-conciousness.
But the nightmares are never far off. In waking hours, I remember the dreams on the winds of experiences that are indelible.
I dreamt that I was driving on an American highway and I came to a cloverleaf where I had to make a decision to turn. So many times I had decided wrongly, so I was filled with apprehension. I turned right and once again found myself going in the wrong direction on a road where it was impossible to turn around and go back. Now I was so filled with frustration that it was a mental illness. I turned sharply to change lanes and then I heard that horrible screeching of metal on metal that I have heard so many times before after impulsively changing direction on the highway. I have caused another accident and will surely be arrested this time. With all of my previous warrants, I'll be imprisoned. I don't want to go to prison! I impulsively violently twist the steering wheel again, more as a physical reaction to my thoughts than as a thoughtful response to my feelings. I'm trying to commit suicide with no particular plan. In this dream, I'm entirely out of control.
I wake up startled and remember the images that have been my bedtime stories since I was 26 years old.
I'll go to the metalworker and have him make the parts for a guillotine, but I'll tell him I'm making a log-splitter. I'll make use of a telephone poll, heaving an enormous weight six yards above my head. Then, I'll let it go, careful not to move so that my head will be severed cleanly from my body. Then my troubles will be over.
Sometimes I long for bed and the comfort of imagining killing myself. It's really the only hope I have of experiencing peace. I once heard a song in church that said,
`Twill will be sweet
When we meet
Over on the distant shore
In the sweet by and by
There'll be joy and gladness over there
[Screams] You won't have to cry no more!
I dreamt I was practicing law again, counseling a the family of a grammar school classmate, a girl whom I had secretly long for, who now had been arrested and charged with a serious crime. I needed to advise her family to seek a criminal lawyer who would immediately make her bail and get her out of jail. I didn't know the ins and outs. I was incompetent.
Then I awoke again and began imaging drowning myself.
. . . I'll walk out onto the reef where the river meets the ocean, where a tall iron post marks the deepest point of the channel. I'll tie my feet to the post with a long rope and then tie my hands to a heavy object, but what? Then, I'll jump into the water, sink to the bottom and drown in the rushing current.
Although I know hard how it is to actually commit suicide, yet I imagined myself slipping unnoticed in the dark of night from my Brazilian hosts' home, walking in the light of the moon to the sandbar in the hopes that I could convince myself to complete that which for three dozen years has remained undone. Perhaps staring into it the darkness would reveal to me some truth about the pain I'm in?
A girlfriend from law school once asked whether I was "troubled", she having established a well-informed opinion about me by herself. The word "troubled" seemed so antique and obtuse and yet it was probably as apt as any other applied to me in my lifetime. She knew me so well.
The sun is out and I have promised to accompany three tourists from São Paulo on a hike to beach renowned nationally for its beauty. Arí, our guide who is a native of the island, meets us on the reef that forms the peninsula where the river and ocean meet. At low tide, we wade across the same river that tour boats ride when the river is higher. I am happy and I am amazed to be happy.
The beach is pristine, without a single sign of human presence. The sun is hot and I walk with the lapping waves cooling the plants of my feet. The Brazilian tourists are psychologists, so we briefly discuss the writings of Freud and Bruer. Above us palm trees stretch their jagged fronds toward to sun while holding tight to steep cliffs that reach dozens of meters upward. After an hour walking the sand, we climb those cliffs and we see the coastline for fifteen miles in each direction.
I cannot imagine why I did not come to Brazil earlier, when I was struggling to "make it" in a society that was so alien to me in so many ways. My brother is making it in America, with two cars, a schooner and a second home in Europe. If I had all those things, I would sell them and return to Brazil to do precisely what I am doing now, walking in the sand with an Indian guide.
Although Arí is an Indian who makes a living showing tourists his native habitat, yet Arí is one of the wealthiest people I know. His family owns an ancestral long and untouched stretch of this same beach, which would be worth millions of dollars if it existed in the United States. For them it is not to be sold or leveraged, but simply to be enjoyed and experienced as the seasons change and the ocean laps at the sand. The tourists labor in the big cities for a year to afford a vacation here and take snapshots of the indescribably beautiful environment that for Arí is home. Arí enjoys this three-hour walk regularly, with or without tourists in tow.
We finally reach our destination, a tourist beach that is not nearly as beautiful as the trek we made to get there. It is festooned with visitors and natives selling necklaces and bracelets fashioned from bright and bland native seeds, large and small. I swim out to a fishing boat balancing on the waves and then across to a schooner some one hundred yards away. And then it starts to rain.
The rain gets stronger and the wind gets harder and we shrink and cringe but there is no shelter on the beach. Thankfully, we have arranged to return to the peninsula by schooner, but now our idyllic ocean voyage will be similar to the first scenes from the shipwreck of Gilligan's Island.
The ship's mate brings a rubber dingy to the shore and we struggle into it as it bounces on the waves. The rain pelts the fifteen-meter schooner and wind tosses it about like a bouy in a storm, but the engine is running and we set off southward, hugging the coast at first. The ocean swells must be about a meter and a half high, and I stare out toward the horizon to avoid becoming seasick. As we push directly into the roiling waves, the boat's bow rises so high that the ocean is no longer visible ahead of us, and then it nosedives downward until uppermost hull is but a hand's length above the violent swells. I was riding with my mouth open, like an excited dog rides along in a car, but now the wind drives the salt water so hard toward us that I have to close my mouth to keep from drowning while sitting on the deck of the boat.
I imagine this boat sinking with one good wave that overruns the bow, and I cowardly imagine swimming back to the coast, carried by these same waves in the opposite direction, ignoring the plight of others unaccustomed to swimming amongst the swells. I also imagine passing out the life preservers that are sitting uselessly in a pile on the deck, but I know that will cause a generalized panic among the tourists who may not yet have realized the danger we might be in. So I just enjoy the ride with the mortal thrill of riding on a roller coaster, until finally the two steel post that mark the mouth of our inlet become visible through the driving rain.
I arrive at Pelé's restaurant chilled to the bone, but Vanda has made hot vegetable soup and rice porridge that chase the chill away. In the innermost interior living room, the only room with stuffed couches and colorful bolsters, bright rugs and pillows on the floor, we sip from hot bowls and there is raucous laughter about jokes that I admittedly only partially understand. Family members make fun of each other and rib me as well, and I always try to receive it good naturedly when my turn comes, trusting with an effort that they are playing with me and not trying to hurt my feelings.
They really enjoy a story I told them about my experiences with French bureaucrats, particularly the women: When I was in France, I often has to request or apply for things and the first answer I received as inevitably "no". Only on the third or fourth visit to an office would they suddenly announce that they had decided to accede to that which had been requested days or weeks before. But sometimes, the answer really was "no" with finality. If I insisted in an insurance office or a realty agency, the clerk woman would eventually push her books away from her on the desk and ask, "Is there something else?" If I again requested the same thing but in a different way, she would become increasingly impatient and, yes, frightened, and ask again, "Is there something else?"
Although to anyone looking on from a distance our conversation would have seemed completely civil and unexceptional, yet I nonetheless eventually left before the woman became frightened and called the police. In France, you must know to get up and leave when a clerk asks, "Is there something else I can help you with?" Because, what they really mean is, "If you stay here one moment more, I will consider you a trespasser and be forced to call the police!" With my Brazilian family it has become a running joke to ask, "Something else, sir?"
Although I thoroughly enjoyed the long hike on the beach and exciting ride back in the schooner, I am looking forward to advancing with the Internet project, which is really the subject of this diary. The following morning, I am up at 7:00 AM, anxious to get started while others are walking about with coffee in their hands and sleep in their eyes. This morning Leo and I will break down the cinderblock wall between two small rooms - a ticket booth and a closet - to create one larger room that will house the Internet access point of the new Brazilian Peninsula Project. I feel guilty for bringing more work to this Brazilian family that is already so active, yet I am committed to this project almost regardless of what it might take to bring it to fruition. I need this activity to quell my inner turmoil and restlessness almost as much as they need it to serve their communication needs.
As Leo and I hammer the concrete wall with the rhythmic cadence of African drums, it falls quickly into heap at our feet. We order a new bifold window through which neighbors and tourists can see the computers in operation and ask to participate. The floor also needs leveling, so we break four yards concrete and begin shoveling the detritus toward the door.
Three weeks ago, Pelé's Internet was little more than a vision and a paper sign announcing that which might be realized if all went well. Now, with a steady stream of neighbors asking when it will be available and with a contract signed for a satellite dish to be installed this week or next, we seem within moments of realizing our objectives.
Now, I am ready to return home, to my dog and hot showers, electricity and my wife and children, yet it has rained for three days and the bus is not running. While on the roads of the United States we have snow, ice and sludge during winter, on the back roads of Brazil they have deep mud and huge potholes. Pelé's brother, his mother, a local businessman and I hire a taxi together and set off toward the city. They begin telling stories of how long these roads have been impassible in the rain and all they have done to travel in spite of it. "Remember that time with João?!", and then they all begin to laugh uproariously, as people who have a shared experience of overcoming outrageous adversity.
Pelé's mother recounts that, precisely because of the conditions of these roads, the has mid-wifed almost all of the children born on the peninsula over the last five decades, including Leo and the children born to Vanda, her daughter-in-law. Those wanting a hospital delivery have to go to a city a month in advance because, even on the best of sunny days, a woman in labor cannot reach the hospital while bumping and swaying over these potholes.
As we sped along a rutted road at 15 miles per hour, dodging potholes and slipping in mud from left to right, we couldn't imagine the new adversity we were about to share. All of the road is horrid after three days of rain, but there is one hill yet to climb that causes even full-size to dismount passengers and lighten the load. When we get there, the mud is deep as snow. To increase our taxi's chances as climbing this hill, the suggests that we all get out and walk up, and we do so because the alternative is to risk being stuck in the mud, in the middle of the forest and dairy pastures, in a light rain.
The taxi backs up thirty yards and then speeds up with its wheels spinning as much as gripping in the mud. Halfway up the hill it stops, the tires begin to smoke with useless rotations, and then the cab slides backwards and sideways off the road and halfway into a ditch. It's left side tires are engulfed in mud that reaches up to the rocker panels.
Pushing and heaving from the front and the sides, we finally manage to free the taxi and the driver takes an even longer head start this time to assault this massive hill. The taxi speeds and slips and slows to a stop halfway up, before the forward-spinning tires slip backward into the same mud from which we had just retrieved it, only deeper this time.
`Now, we're screwed!' I think to myself, but I keep quiet as we look for a way out of our predicament. We spot the skeleton of an abandoned tomato shed some 100 yards up the road and we pick the carcass for wood slats that we place under the taxi's tires for traction. Under the force of spinning tires, one of the slats flies out and hits João in the leg, but his skin is not broken. I pull backward on the car from the side, aware all the while that if it slides toward me I might be buried under this taxi in a foot of mud. Instead, miraculously, the car slides onto the skids we've placed behind it and rolls onto the road again. We turn around and take a much longer route out of the forest.
Four hours after setting out on a two-hour journey, we arrive half-way to my destination and I leave the taxi for a larger bus, where I fall asleep and pass the city where I was due to get off.
Back at home in the "big" city, I can still feel the muscles aching in my back, legs and arms from carrying buckets of concrete away from the Internet construction project, and digging a hole outside where we buried the concrete detritus. The Internet provider sends 20 pages of contracts by e-mail and I return them signed so that our people's Internet can begin operations in the coming week. For a 200 Kbps download speed that can be used accessed all day long, the price will be $275.00 per month USD, instead of $200. Between the monthly payments for the Project's computer and the monthly Internet access, all of which I must sign for if they are to happen at all, I cannot possibly pay my monthly bills unless the Indians and tourists immediately begin using their Internet access point and sharing at least part of its expenses.
I am an unlikely (impossible) philanthropist, since my wife and I can only barely pay the monthly expenses for ourselves and three children. But depression is also very expensive, and with my involvement in starting the Brazilian Peninsula Project's Internet access point, this activity beats back depression better, really, than any of the medications I take. (If readers would like to make a contribution to see this succeed, please go to PayPal.Com and make a contribution to the BrazilianPeninsulaProject@Yahoo.Com.)
Actually, DailyKos contributors have been crucial in encouraging me to continue with this project, even though it is an uphill battle financially, for me and the community whom it is designed to help. Just this week, one DK contributor made a $61.00 USD contribution at PayPay, saying, "I hope that this donation will go through this time." DK contributors paid half of the installation fee for the satellite dish and one contributor has agreed to give $10.00 per month toward the monthly Internet access fee. I deeply appreciate this encouragement, and I the community will as well.
As I said in a recent diary, although the President is responsible for the country's bad foreign policy, yet each of us can still make a good impression overseas.
My determination to help set up a people's Internet on the peninsula has been generously repaid with friendship and integral participation in a vibrant culture that was previously unknown to me. I've also shared the most amazingly delicious dinners of fresh-caught shrimp and fish with an Indian family where long days of hard work are as common as love and laughter.