Category Archives: About Me

Overcoming My Reluctance to Speak Portuguese

23 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in About Me, Brazil, Working Life

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Brazil Wins FIFA World Cup 2002 (www.copadomundo.uol.com.br)

My greatest struggle in becoming fluent in Portuguese was overcoming my reluctance to speak the language. It embarrassed me to make mistakes when speaking to others: incorrect verb tense and endings; incorrect word gender; and, worst of all, the inappropriate use of a word considered offensive or with a sexual connotation in Portuguese.

It did not help when the secretary of the small firm where I worked told me one day in exasperation, as I struggled to give her a telephone message: Você é a minha cruz (You are my cross).

Clients referred to me as aquela gringa que enrola tudo (that foreigner that confuses everything).

Such remarks did nothing to build my battered self-esteem and self-confidence in conquering my place in the workplace. Thank God, the owners of the firm valued my English-speaking skills!

A young man – who I will call Carlos – helped me to unknot my tongue. Before Carlos joined the firm, I had spent my two-hour lunch break locked up alone in the office: a spacious house with a swimming pool in the backyard. Everyone else returned home or went out for lunch. Carlos rode a motor cycle and, oftentimes, joined me for lunch in the kitchen. He had lots of questions about my origins and why I had come to live in Fortaleza. He was the first non-English-speaking Cearense ready to listen and decipher my jumbled speech.

I do not believe in chance or coincidences. Carlos only stayed with us for three months: Enough time to help me overcome my reluctance to speak in a foreign tongue.

Years later, when I started to dream and think in Portuguese, I made an unexpected discovery. In embracing the language, I was embracing the Brazilian culture – their way of thinking and being. The Brazilian people are passionate, so evident in the way they play football (soccer). They are not inhibited in expressing their emotions. I experienced this in the workplace, among my neighbors and friends, and on the streets.  Telling someone “vou te matar” (I’ll kill you) is as acceptable as saying “eu te amo” (I love you).

In overcoming my reluctance to speak Portuguese, I was able to gradually let go of my Victorian, British-colonial bottlenecks and embrace the Brazilain joy of life. I became a new person. Even the way Brazilians pronounced my name – Hose-ah-lee-a-nee – baptized me with a new identity. I was re-born in Brazil. I became uma brasileira de coração (a Brazilian of the heart).

Brazilian Friend of the Heart

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in About Me, Brazil, Human Behavior, Working Life

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Source: Photo by tmpdan, selected for Google Earth (www.panoramio.com)

Fleeing to Brazil where they speak a language different from my own rocked my world. On arrival, I could utter in Portuguese only bom dia, boa tarde, boa noite, obrigada, por favor,  and com licença.

My husband’s Guyanese-Brazilian friend loaned me a Portuguese-English textbook. With nouns having male and female attributes and verb-endings that changed with you and me, and all those others, the Portuguese language seemed a formidable language to learn. I set a target of memorizing ten new words a day. A pocketbook-size English/Portuguese dictionary became my closest companion. For the correct pronunciation of words, I found help in watching the popular novelas de televisão, Brazil’s soap operas.

Help came the day my husband came home with an English-speaking, Brazilian young man willing to teach me Portuguese. He was the life-buoy I craved for surviving in Brazil. I will refer to him as Gabriel.

The afternoon Gabriel took me, my husband, and two sons to the Ponte Metálica – the famous ‘Bridge of the Englishmen’ and remnant of the former Port of Fortaleza – I was unable to squeeze my way out of the packed bus to get off with them. I had to remain on the bus until the next stop. My sons were relieved to see me; Gabriel apologized for the crowded bus. This was the first of many popular places around Fortaleza that Gabriel took us.

Gabriel shared with us some of the dos and don’ts of Brazilian life. He did not make fun of me after I told a store clerk that I was looking for shoes pra você (for you) instead of para mim (for myself). When he graduated from the State University of Ceará, he invited me to join his family at his Graduation Ball.

Through Gabriel, I learned of an opening for a secretary at the Sociedade Brasileira de Cultura Inglesa, a private school for teaching British English and culture. I got the job. After working with them during January and February 1989, I secured a position of import/export assistant at an international trade consultancy firm.

Gabriel was discreet about his sexual orientation. At the university, where we had our first Portuguese lesson, young women flocked him. I never saw him holding hands with another male. Only after knowing me for some time did he disclose that he was gay.

Gabriel taught me that a person’s sexual orientation does not change one’s humanness; that our preconceptions about others rob us of the opportunity of getting to know brilliant and generous individuals who can change our lives for better. Knowing Gabriel, I was able to embrace and work well with gay co-workers at a West Hollywood retail store – enriching my life experience.

Gabriel was my first Brazilian friend, um amigo do coração (friend of the heart). Many other generous people journeyed with me during the sixteen years I lived in Brazil. You will meet them by-and-by.

I Do Not Drive

17 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in About Me, United States

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Los Angeles Freeway near Culver City

SOURCE: Building a Green Collar L.A., June 2009, http://www.dwell.com.

I don’t drive. When I first told a colleague at the retail store in West Hollywood where I once worked, she was flabbergasted: “You’re living in L.A. and you don’t drive? Girl… you’re crazy!”

Moving around in sprawling earthquake-prone Los Angeles – where there appears to be more cars than people – is a great challenge for me. Recently, it took me two hours, travelling on two buses, to get home from an afternoon show on Hollywood Boulevard. I missed the second bus by one minute and had to wait for half-an-hour at a desolate, cold, and windy bus-stop.  Happily, I spent the time chatting with the two female passengers who got off the first bus with me: Australian tourists who had arrived in L.A. the night before.

You never know who you’ll meet when you ride the bus. I just love when I meet people in such an unexpected way. What a small world!

I work from my Home Office. Through my Virtual Office, I can share my knowledge of the Brazilian market. The world is my marketplace.

My decision not to drive was made in the seventies when, as a geography undergraduate at the University of Guyana, I became aware of the effects of exhaust fumes on our delicately balanced biosphere.  Of course, that was only a small part of our habits that was destroying our planet. The bad news had come from a visiting American professor who conducted the one-year course: Biogeography.

I learned a lot that year. I determined then that I would do my part to care
for and save our planet.

When you grow up in a small city where your school, church, workplace, shopping center, and cinemas are all within walking distance, there is no urgency to learn to drive.

That changed when I moved to Fortaleza, capital of the State of Ceará, Northeast Brazil.

Three Worlds One Vision

04 Monday Jul 2011

Posted by in About Me

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From atop the five-foot-high granite wall protecting Georgetown, capital of Guyana, from the forces of the sea, I used to gaze across the muddy brown waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. I was born a coastlander.  My breath synchronized with the rise and fall of the waters. Beyond the horizon lay Europe from whence came the ancestors of my maternal and paternal grandmothers.

The Interior of my birthplace and home for over thirty years was shrouded by a dense tropical rainforest that oftentimes swallowed up small crippled aircraft on their way to remote mining or lumber settlements. Stories of such losses gave me dread of flying over that expansive mottled-green canopy beneath which Masacurraman, the legendary river beast, lurked along waterways and falls to devour those brave enough to venture into what was known as The Bush.

Across the ocean loomed Europe and North America.  Our well-being depended on those distant northern lands: wheat flour for our bread and pastries; cloth for our party dresses; movies, exhibited in the numerous cinemas where we flocked at weekends; Alka-Seltzer to relieve our aches and heartburn.

When my husband and I could no longer stomach the bitter medicine forced down by our dictator in the name of self-reliance, we, together with our two sons – then two and four years old – ventured southwards beyond our forest to the vast and rich land of Brazil. Travelling by bus from the Brazilian border town of Boa Vista onto Manaus, we meandered through Amazônia, the Amazon Rainforest. On the last leg of our journey, from Belem to our destination in Fortaleza, capital of the State of Ceará, our interstate bus crossed the barren landscape of the sertão – the semi-arid interior region of Northeastern Brazil.

Fortaleza hugged the coastline. In that new world which I called my home for sixteen years, the rise and fall of the sea calmed my troubled mind and renewed my energies. On the distant shores of the warm blue-green waters of the South Atlantic Ocean lay the cities, towns, and villages of western Africa from whence came the ancestors of my maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother.

Nowadays, during the warm summer months, I go for walks along the Venice and Santa Monica beaches in Los Angeles, California. Here, the murky blue sea is too cold for my thin tropical blood. I look out across the North Pacific Ocean. Canton in China, from whence came the ancestors of my paternal grandfather, is only fifteen hours away by air. I am closer, too, to India from whence came the ancestors of my sons’ paternal grandfather.

I breathe with the ebb and flow of the seas, connecting the shores of the homeland of my ancestors. My breath is labored. I worry about the future of our planet and our species.