I think that I have experienced my culture shock. It snuck up on me, happened in the course of two hours, slowly unraveling the way I saw Brazilian society as I gradually realized what I haven't been seeing thus far. I've been thinking about the implications ever since, and I really don't understand. I cannot relate. I cannot adapt.
It happened on the bus, a necessary evil in Salvador- a system with inconsistent or nonexistent schedules, notoriety for theft, and in general disregard for efficiency. Saying all that, I should have expected my situation. Having no car, the streets living in a state of disrepair that isn't conducive to biking, and not wanting to pay for a taxi, I opted to take the bus to run some distant errands. It's peak traffic season in Salvador, which was not planned for any kind of traffic, so between 3pm and 9pm I enjoyed two two-hour-long bus rides to the mall along with my co-passengers. Those co-passengers inhabited all the bus seats, aisles, and breathing room, beyond the point of which any (nonexistent) safe capacity laws would allow. The two steps getting off the bus alone hosted 10 sardine-style riders.
So that's the setting. Little to no mobility for two hours in each direction, an all-too-comfortable proximity to your sweaty neighbors, and the only sight or sign of life outside the bus being the heat slowly cooking the bus. I hadn't expected the bus to take that long, so my mood was sub-par to say the least- having so much time just hacked away from my day and put towards nothing seemed like such an injustice to me. At one point, we remained in a standstill for twenty minutes behind some cars while the lane next to us sped by. I stared out the window (through a crowd, so only in glimpses), absolutely incredulous. Why wouldn't he change lanes? Why are we using all the routes with the densest traffic? Isn't there a bus lane? Some kind of solution? I glared around me, hoping to find someone of a like mind, someone to whom I could vent, or at least learn more about the system.
But I didn't see anyone upset. I didn't see anyone looking out the windows, didn't see anyone checking their watches. But it wasn't that Bahian complacency that I was just beginning to know. It was something else entirely. People weren't doing ANYTHING. No curious people watching, except for a creepy man at the back of the bus, no reading books, newspapers, magazines, no conversation due to the volume of traffic sounds, and only a few music-listeners, scattered throughout. It was a glaring difference between the United States and Brasil, but I hadn't noticed it.
The absence of a thing often tells more than its presence, and the absence of activity spoke series on the Bahians. This took up hours of their daily lives, made scheduling almost impossible, made productivity elusive. It was allocating several hours to semi-consciousness, to little more than just existing.
Electronics are expensive, so passengers avoid using them for the most part to avoid theft. Space limitations and sudden movements make reading an undesirable option. Ambient noises make conversation- either via phone or personal- inconvenient.
As an American, it was an interesting perspective. I certainly learned something during those hours, did some contemplation and reflection. But I was still upset about all the things I could have done with that time. The rest of the passengers seemed to have no such frustration.They had gone beyond just accepting the system's flaws. They were patient.
That's one of the biggest differences I've seen in our cultures. Patience. Suppression of any natural annoyance, misfortune, anger or dismay at delay. They accepted the journey, accepted the faults, and arrived at the same destination.
I had a similar encounter with the virtue in a different context this past weekend. I was blessed to join a friend and her host family to their relative's house on an island, Ilha da Itaparica, and in addition to enjoying beautiful beaches, a quaint town, and an entertaining family, we also were able to help prepare for a cousin's 4th birthday.
The Brazilian- or at least this family's- version of a pinata is just a huge balloon, in which they have all kinds of toys- little racecars, noisemakers, suckers, kazoos, animals, etc. The pinata gets major points in comparison to this balloon because to prepare, you just dump all the candy/prizes in. And you can fill it completely. The birthday boy's father was also convinced that we could fill the balloon completely, which provided my second extreme encounter with patience.
We filled the uninflated balloon to capacity and blew up the balloon (picture 5 or 6 normal balloons together), and the father saw all that extra air and said we had room to fit more stuff. We tried to put more toys in, and guess what? When we opened the balloon to put toys in, air came out, and the extra space was gone. We started blowing up the balloon, quickly trying to squeeze a toy or two in before the air escaped, then repeating the process. The toys were about the size of my thumb, and the father was insistent that we should fit several bags full into each balloon.
While supervising, the father suddenly became inspired and became involved. He decided the problem wasn't the air escaping, it was the passageway for the toy- the lip of the balloon was too small to be effective. He took a water bottle, sawed off the top and bottom to have a long and thick plastic tube, then he fashioned it into the balloon. Blowing up the balloon now meant fitting your mouth around the whole water bottle, and the end product? The air would escape faster from the larger opening! At every step along this process, I would try to explain that no, this wouldn't work, XYZ. I tried rationalizing with a cousin who was helping me, tried explaining it to the father, but at every step they were determined that something would work.
Finally, the three of us worked out a system where the father would blow up the balloon, seal the top, then I would pinch off a section of the balloon, creating a vacuum, the father would unseal his portion and the cousin would quickly insert a few toys, he would close up the now empty pocket, I would seal it and a few toys would drop into the balloon with only a little air escaping. It took about 5 minutes for every few toys, and the balloon was getting heavy to the point where I thought the rubber was just going to rip or pop on its own. But the father persisted. He saw only the goal of making the balloon as full as possible for his son and his friends, and didn't mind spending (wasting) over an hour putting it together.
Obviously, some of the things that he did were just nonsensical. The balloon-toy concept is faulted alone and his actions just exacerbated my poor opinion of it, but his process was an interesting one to observe. He didn't do anything that well, but he kept with it, and he got it done. He didn't get frustrated by the issues he faced or by how long it was taking... he just did it. Patience reaps a product.
Ultimately, what this has made me think about is more about America. Are we impatient because we have become accustomed to efficiency? Or have we become so efficient because our culture is impatient?
If it's only an impatient culture that can be driven to efficiency, Salvador may be lost.
Random updates in life:
I started classes a few weeks ago, and those certainly require patience. Professors are typically late to class, if they show up at all. There are some incredibly nice Brazilians in my classes, but overall the schooling system is very different.
As I briefly mentioned, I spent this past weekend on Itaparica. we learned how to paddle-board, played with some fresh live crabs before the "empregada" (maid) cooked them, and found a building painted as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It was gorgeous, and it will never cease to amaze me that island getaways are a cheap and convenient part of my life.
This weekend brings some exciting new adventures, a boating day trip, St. Patrick's day, and a concert tonight.
Started visiting different sites last week to determine where I wanted to volunteer, and there are certainly a lot of causes here. One of the most interesting things about this is that Portuguese, or at least Brazilian Portuguese, doesn't have a word for 'to volunteer'. It's highly uncommon for Brazilians themselves to do volunteer work, and a lot of the organizations are foreign-based. The ones we're working with are more local, but for security/privacy reasons I won't give many details until after.
So that's the setting. Little to no mobility for two hours in each direction, an all-too-comfortable proximity to your sweaty neighbors, and the only sight or sign of life outside the bus being the heat slowly cooking the bus. I hadn't expected the bus to take that long, so my mood was sub-par to say the least- having so much time just hacked away from my day and put towards nothing seemed like such an injustice to me. At one point, we remained in a standstill for twenty minutes behind some cars while the lane next to us sped by. I stared out the window (through a crowd, so only in glimpses), absolutely incredulous. Why wouldn't he change lanes? Why are we using all the routes with the densest traffic? Isn't there a bus lane? Some kind of solution? I glared around me, hoping to find someone of a like mind, someone to whom I could vent, or at least learn more about the system.
But I didn't see anyone upset. I didn't see anyone looking out the windows, didn't see anyone checking their watches. But it wasn't that Bahian complacency that I was just beginning to know. It was something else entirely. People weren't doing ANYTHING. No curious people watching, except for a creepy man at the back of the bus, no reading books, newspapers, magazines, no conversation due to the volume of traffic sounds, and only a few music-listeners, scattered throughout. It was a glaring difference between the United States and Brasil, but I hadn't noticed it.
The absence of a thing often tells more than its presence, and the absence of activity spoke series on the Bahians. This took up hours of their daily lives, made scheduling almost impossible, made productivity elusive. It was allocating several hours to semi-consciousness, to little more than just existing.
Electronics are expensive, so passengers avoid using them for the most part to avoid theft. Space limitations and sudden movements make reading an undesirable option. Ambient noises make conversation- either via phone or personal- inconvenient.
As an American, it was an interesting perspective. I certainly learned something during those hours, did some contemplation and reflection. But I was still upset about all the things I could have done with that time. The rest of the passengers seemed to have no such frustration.They had gone beyond just accepting the system's flaws. They were patient.
That's one of the biggest differences I've seen in our cultures. Patience. Suppression of any natural annoyance, misfortune, anger or dismay at delay. They accepted the journey, accepted the faults, and arrived at the same destination.
The Brazilian- or at least this family's- version of a pinata is just a huge balloon, in which they have all kinds of toys- little racecars, noisemakers, suckers, kazoos, animals, etc. The pinata gets major points in comparison to this balloon because to prepare, you just dump all the candy/prizes in. And you can fill it completely. The birthday boy's father was also convinced that we could fill the balloon completely, which provided my second extreme encounter with patience.
We filled the uninflated balloon to capacity and blew up the balloon (picture 5 or 6 normal balloons together), and the father saw all that extra air and said we had room to fit more stuff. We tried to put more toys in, and guess what? When we opened the balloon to put toys in, air came out, and the extra space was gone. We started blowing up the balloon, quickly trying to squeeze a toy or two in before the air escaped, then repeating the process. The toys were about the size of my thumb, and the father was insistent that we should fit several bags full into each balloon.
While supervising, the father suddenly became inspired and became involved. He decided the problem wasn't the air escaping, it was the passageway for the toy- the lip of the balloon was too small to be effective. He took a water bottle, sawed off the top and bottom to have a long and thick plastic tube, then he fashioned it into the balloon. Blowing up the balloon now meant fitting your mouth around the whole water bottle, and the end product? The air would escape faster from the larger opening! At every step along this process, I would try to explain that no, this wouldn't work, XYZ. I tried rationalizing with a cousin who was helping me, tried explaining it to the father, but at every step they were determined that something would work.
Finally, the three of us worked out a system where the father would blow up the balloon, seal the top, then I would pinch off a section of the balloon, creating a vacuum, the father would unseal his portion and the cousin would quickly insert a few toys, he would close up the now empty pocket, I would seal it and a few toys would drop into the balloon with only a little air escaping. It took about 5 minutes for every few toys, and the balloon was getting heavy to the point where I thought the rubber was just going to rip or pop on its own. But the father persisted. He saw only the goal of making the balloon as full as possible for his son and his friends, and didn't mind spending (wasting) over an hour putting it together.
Obviously, some of the things that he did were just nonsensical. The balloon-toy concept is faulted alone and his actions just exacerbated my poor opinion of it, but his process was an interesting one to observe. He didn't do anything that well, but he kept with it, and he got it done. He didn't get frustrated by the issues he faced or by how long it was taking... he just did it. Patience reaps a product.
Ultimately, what this has made me think about is more about America. Are we impatient because we have become accustomed to efficiency? Or have we become so efficient because our culture is impatient?
If it's only an impatient culture that can be driven to efficiency, Salvador may be lost.
Random updates in life:
I started classes a few weeks ago, and those certainly require patience. Professors are typically late to class, if they show up at all. There are some incredibly nice Brazilians in my classes, but overall the schooling system is very different.
As I briefly mentioned, I spent this past weekend on Itaparica. we learned how to paddle-board, played with some fresh live crabs before the "empregada" (maid) cooked them, and found a building painted as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It was gorgeous, and it will never cease to amaze me that island getaways are a cheap and convenient part of my life.
This weekend brings some exciting new adventures, a boating day trip, St. Patrick's day, and a concert tonight.
Started visiting different sites last week to determine where I wanted to volunteer, and there are certainly a lot of causes here. One of the most interesting things about this is that Portuguese, or at least Brazilian Portuguese, doesn't have a word for 'to volunteer'. It's highly uncommon for Brazilians themselves to do volunteer work, and a lot of the organizations are foreign-based. The ones we're working with are more local, but for security/privacy reasons I won't give many details until after.
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