What is going right--and still wrong--in Brazil's most elderly northeastern capital? Let's get a head start by reading this article.
Salvador, the capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, has a population of around 3 million, making it by different estimates either Brazil's fourth or fifth largest city (competing somewhere near the ranks of Recife and Brasília). Arriving in my new home on February 14th, I was faced with a busy metropolis in a transitioning moment of identity crisis. Like many other of Brazil's touristic centers today, Salvador is attracting substantial international foreign direct and domestic investment, particularly in the real estate sector. But coupled with this sense of growth are severe infrastructural limitations--such as that because the city lies on a rough peninsula, it cannot expand its major avenues and thoroughfares, resulting in awkward urban growth patterns and swelling population and traffic density. As a result, despite an eruption in private car ownership in recent years, given Brazilians' new relative ease of access to credit and higher wages, congestion is such that driving, to put it enthusiastically, has become quite an adventure. Besides traffic being at its worst in decades, Salvador is not among the world's least intimidating cities in other ways. When I first arrived, for instance, I met the Military Police just slowly picking back up work after their three-week-long strike, which saw homicide rates suddenly surge in the worst-off and most gang-oriented neighborhoods. The city currently currently has some of Brazil's highest and also-fastest growing rates of homicide and violent theft, trends that have acutely afflicted the country's Northeast in particular during the last half decade, even while over the same period the more prosperous cities of the South and Southeast have become safer.
In other words, Salvador is the type of city in which it is essential to remain guarded, cautious, and ultra-attentive when in public spaces, especially during festivals, because order and peace can promptly descend into disorganization and violence at virtually any time. Meanwhile, the capital of my home state is still paradoxically renowned as Brazil's "Capital of Happiness." This can be attributed in part to the laid-back attitude, energetic rhythms, and dancing spirit of the soteropolitanos, as its residents are locally known. Why is any of this relevant to a US-based ambassador of culture and public service? Because there is a lot of work to be done in the way of reducing inequality and better ensuring that Bahia's lowest wage earners have their basic needs met, through such measures as the delivery of food to orphanages, and fortifying investments in public schools. Because there is a worthy challenge in reconciling the competing forces of of breakneck economic growth with stubborn inequality, all alongside the need to maintain Salvador's beyond-rich colonial heritage. Such actions are merely minor examples of the several channels that must be fulfilled in order to ease the misery that motivates Salvador's urban insecurity. Should they be fulfilled, the result should be the distillation and presentation of only Salvador's most brilliant and enjoyable attributes to the global audience at this make-or-break time for Brazil, especially when it comes time to co-host the World Cup. These observations are also relevant to an Ambassadorial Scholar because successfully living in Brazil's oldest city as a relative foreigner--whether a Brazilian national or not--requires a high degree of cultural sensitivity. This means the ability to tread lightly when needed, to track one's surroundings, to know one's place and destination, and to listen and learn to do as the locals do. This is all necessary and good training for international business and diplomacy. Learning these maneuvers of coping with Salvador's inefficiencies, bureaucratic and physical gridlock, and disorder with a calm smile one one's face--what is locally referred to as the jeitinho brasileiro, or "Brazilian Way," is essential to the fulfillment of my ambassadorial duties. What more can I say than my absorption and exercise of this set of lessons is steadily in progress...
And what about school? From early March through at least December 10th of this year, I am enrolled in the post-graduate program in Social Sciences at the Federal University of Bahia--the largest, oldest, and most prestigious in the state. After a six-month-long saga to discern what would be my academic status as a Rotary Scholar to either Nicaragua or Panama or Brazil, the management of the UFBA Social Sciences Department agreed to accept me as a visiting "Special Student"--one who has gained admission not expressly through exceptional past performance on the Brazilian standardized university entrance exam, the Vestibular, but by the merit of a research proposal. I gather that my bargain which allowed me to gain this edge was offering to collaborate with my UFBA Master's coordinator on the co-publishing of an article about Plano Brasil Sem Miséria and the evolution of Brazilian social welfare programs, which I completed in late April. My courses At UFBA (the Portuguese acronym for Universidade Federal da Bahia by which the school is known) are stationed in just one of the many UFBA campuses spread about the Salvador peninsula, in the School of Philosophy and Human Sciences of the São Lázaro district, about a 15-minute bus ride, or a 25-minute walk, to the west of my neighborhood of Graça. (I tend to walk to class because I rather enjoy Salvador's year-round humidity.) I am this semester taking one course on Brazilian electoral politics and political systems, which meets for four hours on Thursday mornings, and one course on Latin American comparative politics, which meets during the same period on Fridays. For me, the highlight of the former course is learning the theory used to analyze changes in the congressional structure and electoral dynamics of Brazil. The major advantage of the latter is that in our final projects, my classmates and I will have the chance to look up comparative data about the functions of and popular attitudes toward democracy in at least eight South American countries.
Certainly, I have noticed substantial cultural differences in the class structure and teaching style at UFBA versus what I know of its US counterparts. The first regards grading structure: from what I can understand, the final mark of the UFBA post-graduate social sciences student is essentially based 85% on participation in class discussions and provision of verbal evidence of having done the day's readings, and 15% on one large final paper; neither of my courses require quizzes, midterms, or final exams. The second is that the discussion format of the classes is quite loose and student-driven, with the professor providing basic conceptual guidance but almost never lecturing in the more strict and methodical fashion I grew used to back in the US. The debates in my courses often get so passionate and off-topic that I've resigned myself to primarily just listening for what may be the first time in my academic career. This explosion of personal anecdotes and exchange of heated, digressive points of view--all while maintaining a hearty smile and good humor--is something I find as quintessentially baiano as red palm oil. For all of those debate partners and classmates of mine back at Ashland High School and the Claremont Colleges who complained that I spoke too much, please consider this: I am the quietest student in at least one of my classes, and project around an average noise level in the other. Part of this is merely logical: I am encountering a steep learning curve having not studied in Brazil for years. Week after week I find myself amid a group of peers who spent the same years during which I was delivering sermons at the Harvard Model UN Conference training in the art of Brazilian political debate, sophisticating their academic Portuguese, which I feel is almost unnecessarily more verbose than the street form. Needless to say, the debate content of my courses has in many cases grown over my head. Hence, I've found the need to discover a personal silver lining. About three weeks ago I determined that the major function of my first semester at UFBA has simply been accumulating the professional-caliber Portuguese necessary to describe situations and theories and in political studies and economics. Not bad.
Altogether, I have learned to enjoy my courses, however organizationally novel they may be to me. This is mainly because I have the chance to understand the intricacies and extreme bureaucratic complexities of Brazilian political life from the perspective of students who have lived through it and tend to stay reasonably informed about the country's current events, advancements, injustices, and corruption scandals. The class discussion is lively, rich, and in a most Brazilian way, often interrupted by the professor's outbursts of frustration with "the system," and other moments of comedy. This process has allowed me new insight into the societal dilemmas most pertinent to politically intellectual Brazilians, such as healthcare, corruption, embezzlement by politicians, infrastructural morass, and party militancy. I am happy to have the challenge to not only stay abreast of Brazilian current events, but to provide relevant perspectives based on my experiences living in the US and other American countries. Still, I remain more personally focused on Brazilian economic issues than anything else, which has led me to realize that I would be getting more out of my time in Brazil academically had I strove harder to enroll in a department of Business Administration. It looks my later enrollment in another Master's program--preferably back in the US and in something that deals with the intersection of diplomacy and international business--will be in order as we head toward 2014.
One of the marked features about gaining a public education in Brazil--and indeed about Brazilian popular society in general--is the lack of books. Printed literature is so expensive in Brazil that even the libraries of large, supposedly prestigious universities are sparsely filled, even the bookshelves of wealthy households, well--often non-existent. As only one result, students at UFBA tend to purchase photocopies of hundreds of pages of required class reading from texts borrowed from their professors, as opposed to themselves buying texts that are outside of their financial reach. This leads to a great deal of mayhem at campus printing centers, and students getting behind in their readings, especially at the beginnings of semesters, as the printing centers (generally understaffed holes in walls with inadequate technology) get inundated with more photocopy requests than they can efficiently fill. I find this just tragic, and am going to put my foot down about it. In the wake of its successes in using social welfare to combat poverty in the last nine years, the federal government of Brazil is today famed for flaunting the slogan "País Rico É País Sem Pobreza:" "A Rich Country Is a Country Without Poverty." May I also suggest that President Rousseff's people add the corollary, "A Rich Country is A Country of Abundant, Affordable Books." Period. I've already vented and cried about this, one of the most dreadful and fundamentally misguided of setbacks to Brazilian development, for hours to various of my compatriots. But for now I will just leave those looking for holes in markets with one hypothetical: imagine what a discount online bookseller, in the fashion of a Powell's or an Amazon, coupled with a more reliable shipping network, could do for the World's Seventh Economy--a place of immense and unstoppable new demand for skilled labor, without the intellectual facilities to satisfy it...
Outside of copy center bottlenecks, the greatest roadblock to my education I've so far encountered here has been a bus strike that began earlier this week and has now lasted five days... Salvador's bus union members, which also correspond with the most powerful private lobby in city politics, are clamoring for higher wages. Though radio coverage of the event has been non-stop, so far nobody has a clear idea when the walkout will stop and when the flow of the city will return to normal. It is impossible to overstate the constraining effect this has on a city in which there is still no effective metro system and at least a third of the population are still too poor to own cars (which, if you read the first paragraph in this entry you will ironically but surely agree is a good thing, anyway). This week's strike happened to arise at the moment when a classmate of mine and I were to give our most important group presentation of the semester. Due to the immobility of Salvador on that Friday (I'd estimate around 70% students depend on the bus system to get to and from class), my professor had no choice but to cancel and reschedule the class. Everybody presumes that we will reconvene next week, and many hold their breath. Result: here I am blogging instead.
Enough narrative, let's get to photos, of which a single one paints a thousand words anyway:
Behind me is the main administrative center of UFBA's São Lázaro campus, which houses the Schools of Philosophy and Social Sciences. Historical legacy, indeed!
Where have all of Bahia's affordable books gone? If Brazil's ridiculously high taxes, high shipping costs, limited interstate infrastructure, weak property protections, and overall injustice weren't so, we wouldn't have to deal with this mess in the São Lázaro campus's copy and print center--among other things that might even shake the earth to a greater degree... Think about it, my friends.
One enormous boon of studying at my section of UFBA is this elevated view of the good ol' Atlantic Ocean, yet again in characteristically Brazilian fashion a comforting distraction from the injustice... Don't mind if I do!
The Big Payoff: Wrapping up my four-hour Thursday and Friday morning classes with an excellent, typically baiano US$4 lunch at a São Lázaro eatery near my campus... What I said at the end of the last caption.
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