Imagining What I Can't Imagine

Originally uploaded by Blue Dragonfly Girl

I landed back home in Austin yesterday and waited in the gray of the wet afternoon for my boyfriend to pick me up.

We then drove to Curra's where we ordered our usual: Oaxacan coffee, huevos motuleños for him, the taco vegetariano plate for me. These items join frito pie on the list of food I'll miss. Because it's not just the food, it's also the environment where you eat it.

I drank far too much coffee (delicious as it was) for 4 'o' clock in the afternoon. I started feeling a tad jittery. And sometime during our meal, I started realizing that I was leaving for Brazil really damn soon. During my December holidays in the cold northeast, Brazil had seemed like more of a hazy daydream. Now it was a reality moving steadily closer and closer.

I now have 12 days left in Austin. All of a sudden, I'm counting things down. For example, this amounts to 3 yoga classes until I get my teaching certificate. After this evening, only 1 more visit with the young woman that I mentor through Big Brothers Big Sisters. 16 envelopes with 16 stamps to buy to give to my Little Sister so that she could send me letters in Brazil. 1 (more) phone call to AT&T to put my phone on Reduced Rate Suspension. Countless hugs goodbye to all sorts of wonderful people. Probably 10 trillion remaining things on my to-do-in-order-to-prepare-for-Brazil list...8 trillion of which probably won't get done and may not have been that important anyway.

What is so interesting and daunting about planning for this kind of thing is that I don't really know what I'm getting myself into. I know I need to be open to whatever it is, but I can't even really imagine what it is. I could look at thousands of photos marked 'Porto Alegre' on Flickr. I could read up on the Brazilian juvenile justice system or about the weather in Southern Brazil. But, until I arrive, I can't imagine what I'll see and smell and hear and do and feel. I don't know what my internship will look like.

For the most part I'm cool with this; I can blithely enter into this exercise of patience and acceptance of the unknown. Still, there's another, smaller part of me that shows up, mostly in my dreams, and feels anxious and insecure. It asks, "How are you going to do this? How will you connect with these kids you'll be working with? Who do you think you are? You think you speak Portuguese well enough for this kind of work, huh?" Reminding myself that it'll all turn out the way it needs to sometimes feels trite.

In a recent dream I arrived at the first day of my internship. It turned out to be a small one-room alternative school for juvenile offenders connected by a walkway to the public school. The kids were playing cards (certainly a detail I can connect to a recent meeting with my faculty liaisons).  Everyone wanted to feed me, but because I was vegetarian they didn't quite know how. They opened up the fridge. The freezer was completely full of beans and rice. Not in containers, but like a huge block of ice occupying all the space in the freezer.

For a dream that was supposed to indicate anxiety and unresolved fears, I guess I should have been comforted. For starters, the dream was in Portuguese. The people were all very friendly and into showing me around. The kids seemed cute and ready to teach me how to play cards. And hey, if I had an ice pick I could have hacked out and defrosted some rice and beans to eat. I think the feeling of the dream had been one of just being very willing to be led around and shown this new world. Just infused with a dash of anxiety about how I might fit into that world.

After our meal, with very full bellies, my boyfriend drove us back home. I started neatly piling up things I wanted to pack for Porto Alegre on the futon couch in the study. Feeling that interesting mixture of excitement, anticipation, sadness and anxiety while folding dresses, piling books and travel documents and crossing things off my to-do list. Trying to prepare for what I can't fully imagine right now, but will experience in 12 days time. Feeling both happy and scared and almost ready for this adventure.

Planning Curitiba

Now that I've written about how I'm mainly going to stay in PoA during my 4 months in Brazil, I'll amuse y'all by already adding a second stop on my travel wishlist: Curitiba.

It's north of PoA, but only by 340 miles...Considering that in Texas, I'll drive 6 hours from Austin to South Padre Island/Brownsville for a long weekend, I think it's a feasible trip.

When people hear I'm going to Brazil, they often remind me of the violence there. That perception will certainly be a topic of a future blog entry, likely more than one, considering that I'll be working with kids in trouble with the law. However, as a result of people telling me to "be careful" and probably as a result of all this social work training I'm getting, I'm especially curious to seek out what is working well in the country.

Curitiba, which has been called "...the best planned city in Brazil and an international model for sustainable development," appears to be a good example things working well.

In PBS's Frontline/World, Tim Gnateke traveled to the city and writes about the experience here. He writes, "When I first began reading about Curitiba, I imagined a golden city whose planners had solved all the problems of urban living."

Of course, the reality didn't quite live up to that expectation (how could it?), but Gnateke describes what he does see:

While visiting Curitiba, I witnessed scenes of daily life that added greater dimension to the international model I read about back home. Seconds after a man tossed an empty can onto a dark street, I watched a child dart from a corner to collect and redeem it for cash or food through Curitiba's world-renowned Cambio Lixio trash exchange program. I saw people lining up all hours of the night to log on at free, public Internet terminals along Rua 24 Horas -- one of the city's lively pedestrian-only streets, lined with shops and restaurants. I watched children playing on park equipment that I learned was transported to Curitiba by an old city bus, later converted into a mobile recreation center. The vignettes were testaments to the city's embrace of urban planning and environmental protection -- something I didn't witness in the rest of my travels in Brazil.

It can be easy to idealize a place without ever going there. I just feel interested to see what "progressive urban planning" can look like in a developing country, what it looks like compared to cities I've lived, and to hear what locals actually feel about where they live. People come from all over the world to gain inspiration from Curitiba's urban planning and so it'll be fun to step out of the literature about the city and into the actual city, to look for that inspiration on the street-level.