The Olympic glow

We had been in Rio for less than an hour, when I started having second thoughts. Our taxi was speeding down a highway bordering a favela, and the driver told us “When shootings break out, I park on the side of the road and we crouch down.” It was the routine warning of a Disney operator telling passengers to keep their arms and legs inside the ride at all times.

But times were rough in Rio. It was important to be prepared. Just last week, he had to put the plan into action while driving tourists to the airport. Ruddy and I smiled and nodded, but squeezed each other’s hands all the way to our Airbnb.

Three months later, I was back on the same highway, swooping into Rio to cover the Olympics and Paralympics. The city was gleaming. Two hundred flags lined the road, welcoming visitors in every language. Loud, colorful panels blocked the view of the favelas, and signs with the Rio 2016 motto “A New World,” covered decaying bridges and tunnels.

It reminded me of the Potemkin village, a fake, portable town built only to impress Catherine II during her visit to Russia in 1787.  There is a wonderful term derived from that story in Portuguese: So para Ingles ver. Only for Englishmen to see. It means “just for show," and is often used to describe that very Brazilian of situations: laws that look great on paper but are not enforced or are easy to bend. 

The Olympics may have been for Englishmen to see, but Brazilians were also watching. A very real excitement spread around Rio, as it pulled off the world's biggest party. Despite the price they were paying for the Olympics, Brazilians were enjoying it more than anyone. They whooped and cheered and booed, giving fencing, ping pong and wheelchair basketball the same treatment they gave club football teams. Even when a Brazilian wasn’t playing, the crowd would adopt an underdog.

I was at a swim meet where the mother of a Romanian swimmer sat next to hundreds of Brazilian fans who were waiting for a different race to start. She stood up and cheered on her own for her daughter, who was in last place, until her voice went hoarse. Seeing this, the Brazilian fans began chanting the daughter’s name. Soon, to the mother’s surprise, her daughter’s name echoed through the stadium. The Romanian inched to seventh, bewildered by the support, and her mother hugged all the Brazilians around her.

During moments like these, I choked with a pride for Brazil I didn’t know I had. I found myself navigating extremes when speaking to others about the country. I became a vehement defender of Brazil to Americans and wealthy Brazilians, who claimed it was a wasteland, but was quick to point out problems to visitors who saw it as paradise. I nearly cried watching Brazil's history hashed out during the opening ceremony, but felt nauseous walking day after day through the half demolished remnants of the Vila Autodromo, a favela that was levelled to make room for the temporary media center. After the Olympics ended, I slept for two days. 

I landed in Brasilia with just enough time to catch my breath before I found myself in the senate chamber for the first presidential impeachment in 20 years. With in days, the Senate voted to oust the sitting president, Dilma Rousseff, and Vice President Michel Temer was quietly sworn in. Before anyone had time to digest the implications of the impeachment, it was time to put on a smile and crank up the music again. I got myself on a flight back to Rio for the Paralympics.

The world had its doubts about Brazil hosting the Olympics, but the Paralympics were expected to be a disaster. Just days before the start of the games, funding sources, accessibility issues and ticket sales were still in question. But, once again, the Brazilian fans didn’t disappoint. The stadiums were bursting with Brazilians. They gave Paralympic athletes’ nicknames and squealed at the sight of their gold medals.  "They treated us like superstars," one British athlete told me, on her way out of the country.

Thunder cracked above the Maracana stadium on the night of the closing ceremony, announcing the last call. A downpour washed over the city, and confetti exploding from the arena stuck to our hands and faces. As I weaved past the athletes on my way out of the stadium, a dreadlocked amputee balancing on one leg in the middle of the rain, lifted his hands to the air and shouted, “I love Brazil! I love Brazilians! I love the Maracana!”

It was a mission accomplished. The athletes won their medals, the journalists filed their pieces, and somehow the country pulled off one of the world’s largest events with no obvious catastrophes. After two months under the world’s gaze, Brazilians, drunk from all that smiling, breathed a sigh of relief and turned off the lights.   

All in the Family

A few weekends ago I was feeling particularly blue, alone in a hotel room in Brasilia, Brazil’s sterile capital. Bored, I called my grandmother and laid out my weekend plans: Netflix and apartment hunting. This wouldn’t do, my grandmother said, as she hung up the phone. “You need to see people.”

A few hours later, I found myself in an SUV, as a family of five I'd never met before toured me around Brasilia for six and a half hours. They pointed out the best pizza places, their favorite monuments and the mall where everyone commits suicide. When their year-old baby needed a dipper change, it happened in the trunk of the car.  When their teenage daughter remembered she had to study for a math test the next day, her dad told her it would have to wait. Nothing could detract from their task to keep me away from my lonely hotel room as long as possible.

My connection to this family was precarious. The father was my grandmother’s childhood best friend’s son. That mouthful of a flimsy link was enough for these strangers to adopt me for the day.

Brazilians are never alone. I first caught wind of this at 16, while traveling on my own for the first time in my life. I was walking past the Louvre in Paris, when an elderly woman pounced on me. Between squeals and kisses, she introduced herself as my grandfather’s cousin, who had lived in Paris for the last two decades. For the next six weeks, she took to the ballet at the magnificent Opera Garnier, negotiated curfews with my crazy host family, and introduced me to French food and wine.

My French aunt and I at my wedding last year.

This flexible notion of family serves Brazilians well. Physiologists have shown that daily community interactions, especially those involving people with whom we share strong ties, are integral to happiness. While I’m skeptical of national happiness survey, it is remarkable that Brazil consistently tops developing countries as having the happiest people. 

In the United States, where scattered families are the norm and “successful” children leave the nest at 18, there have been several attempts at recreating the sense of belonging that families once provided. These span the spectrum from luxury buildings with planned game nights and shared gyms to intentional living communities, where everything from cooking to raising children is a joint task.

To be sure, living with family is not always easy. Close ties often come with a daily dose of opinions and criticism spared those living far away.

Still, the hardest part of moving to the United States was missing out on this connection with my extended family. Growing up in Sao Paulo, my weekends were booked. Every Saturday and Sunday, barring a major medical emergency, we would travel for three hours to my grandmother’s house. There, in a podunk town in southern Brazil, I would spend all day playing with my cousins in the pool, summersaulting from my uncle’s shoulders into the water. I knew the smell of my great grandmother’s favorite mints, how my cousin liked her eggs, and my uncle’s McDonald’s order by heart. All that knowledge evaporated when we moved and our weekly visits were replaced with sporadic trips every other year, or whenever we had the money.

The memory of that intimacy pulled me back to Brazil.  I wanted to know my family again, to participate in the daily moments that make up a life. So, a few weeks after moving back, when my uncle invited us all for a weekend on his farm, I immediately said yes.

I was amazed to find identical trees as far as the eye could see, sprouting out of the same purple earth that drew my family to this region decades ago, first for sugar cane, then cotton, now rubber.

A dozen of us gathered in the farmhouse, sleeping in bunk beds at night and hammocks during the day, with little to do but talk to each other. We lounged around discussing names for my cousin’s baby, due in a few months.  I learned that my grandmother hates sweets and that my grandfather’s hands look exactly like my father’s. The same shallow nails and stubby fingers interlaced mine.

Our quiet weekend was interrupted when my uncle invited the entire town and two priests to consecrate a chapel he built on the farm. Brazilian farms and plantations traditionally have a small church, where laborers and families can worship.

Grass was still being laid around the chapel when the guests arrived. Eighty people from the local town and all the people who built the chapel packed in for a catholic mass. My aunt and uncle dressed the altar in white lace and placed a statue of the Virgin Mary neatly on the wall. The priests blessed the giant wooden doors and prayed that anyone walking through them would find themselves home.

Sequel, or Rerun?

Photo Credit: Gareth Leonard

Wandering the aisles of a grocery store on my first day in Rio, a long-forgotten detergent jingle slipped back into my head. It was only when I got to the checkout line that I realized my cart was a nine-year-old's fantasy: cookies, chocolate milk, candy bars and yogurt-- not a vegetable in sight.

Until our move back to Brazil, my relationship with the country was stuck in 1998. But I'm reminded daily that this is not the country I left behind.

In spite of their breezy and jovial stereotypes, Brazilians are self-critical to an extreme. A casual conversation with a stranger will quickly turn into a stoning of Brazil's corruption, inefficiency and uncultured citizens.

"Why go to Brazil? All there is to see are poverty and slums," a relative said on the eve of our move. "It's less developed than countries in Africa," warned another.

Brazilians wear their cynicism with pride--the curated wariness of the wise. This deep-rooted pessimism unites residents of every social class. But it's not without cause. Brazilians hold on for dear life as the country rides through the chronic booms and busts of a cyclical economy. One day investors are rushing into the country with seemingly insatiable demand for its resources, and the next, savings turn to dust in shuttered banks and bankrupt stores.

Still, coming back after 20 years, it is difficult not to spot signs of progress everywhere I look. Gone are the gaunt children and young mothers begging for money at every red light. Gambian immigrants have replaced kids and teenagers selling food and toys on the beach. Housekeepers armed with fresh labor rights are no longer confined to matchbox rooms in the back of the home, working 15-day shifts.

These snapshots of development are not the rose-colored outlook of a returning traveler. Forty million Brazilians--one out of every five--have been lifted out of poverty since the mid 1990's, thanks in part to popular cash transfer programs like Bolsa Familia. From 2001 to 2007, Brazil managed to cut the percentage of people living in extreme poverty in half.

But less than two months before what was supposed to be Brazil's shining debut at the Olympics, the mood in Rio is decisively sour.

Brazilians see the progress of the last two decades slipping through their fingers. Slowly but surely, hunger and inequality are creeping back. Crime is swelling in the city as the government fights to keep a lid on drug trafficking and "pacify" the favelas.

The more cynical among us saw it coming. "It'll never last," friends said in 2007, when Brazil became the darling of investors.

Last weekend we climbed the Arpoador, an ungainly bolder jutting off the coast of Ipanema. Dozens moseyed up, surveying their city from another perspective. Rio dazzles. The city is a sensational juxtaposition of graffiti-tattooed buildings and flamboyant mountains. On cue, the spectators took their seats. Everyone applauded as the sun surrendered, celebrating the end of one more day.

Dangerous Currents

I still remember trying to peal off the pink wallpaper in my room. Faded pencil dashes grayed the wall, marks of my childhood. We were moving and I was trying to understand what was going to happen to the only home I'd ever known. The idea of another nine-year-old girl replacing my height marks with her own bothered me. Couldn't I just take the wallpaper with me? What if I didn't like who was going to be sleeping in my room?

Life in Sao Paulo, Brazil's polluted metropolis, had reached a boiling point. Fed up with crime and corruption, my parents packed our lives into a couple of suitcases and announced we were moving. They were determined to leave. So determined that they took off with no jobs or family to anchor them. It paid off and they traded Sao Paulo's smoggy skyline for suburban Miami's green lawns and strip malls. They never looked back.

That was 18 years ago. This week, much to their dismay, I reversed that journey. With four suitcases and 1 1/4 jobs between us, my husband and I moved to Brazil. We left behind stable jobs in the US, a wonderful apartment and some of the best friends we've ever had, and landed in a country that almost everyone agrees is falling apart. The laundry list of Brazil's current problems will give any place a run for its money.

Gripped by the worst recession since the 1930's, a mysterious Zika epidemic, a failing health system and a political crisis that is threatening the country's democracy, Brazil is paralyzed. Yesterday, the president was impeached, sparking mass protests around the country.

But my memories here planted in me a curiosity I've long wanted to water. After we left, I spent my summers trying to piece together a Brazilian identity. I'd try to pick up new slang from my cousins, mimic the style of Brazilian actresses I saw on TV, listen to sad Bossa Nova songs on repeat, hoping the lyrics would seep into me.

Still, I was always playing catch up. On prolonged trips the holes in my identity would inevitably shine through, and I'd return to the United States a stranger in both lands. As I moved around the world, nothing would make me happier than seeing a glimpse of Brazil abroad. The thick green hills of Mozambique, the empanadas in Chile, the windy roads in France, all looked like home.

It's time to see the real thing. I want to rediscover Brazil as an adult, dive into the good and the bad, and pack up my own bags when I think it's time to go.