My Language Struggles in Brazil!

By Nancy Kasvosve

I cannot believe it but I am sadly at the tail end of my time in Brazil :(! .  Before this internship, I had never imagined I would ever come to Latin America. Brazil was one of those countries I grew up loving so much, because of my insane love for socce,r and had only gotten a taste of it through meeting Brazilians in college, including one of my closest buddies Bruno. When Bruno moved back home after college,  we never thought we would see each other again but look at us now!

Bruno( on the right), Vinicri and I on the town!

When I applied for this internship, I honestly  did not think I was going to get it. I knew I was a great candidate for it but the one thing I did not have was Portuguese. I was sure if someone else with language skills was as passionate about this position as I am I would lose it to them. Fast forward a few months later, I landed in Sao Paulo having bravely given up an offer to be in my old stomping grounds, Africa, for this novel experience in a new place . Armed with Duolingo and a “Learn Brazilian Portuguese”  audio book, I embarked on my 13 week journey in Brazil.

My first week on the job was already in the deep end of the language struggle. It was a field research week where my boss took me around Sao Paulo to conduct some market research through interviewing various stakeholders relevant to renal services in Brazil. It was a very enlightening week of meeting nephrologists, clinic administrators and patients and hearing their thoughts on how to improve the delivery of renal care in Brazil; it was all in Portuguese. My very first struggles were just trying to follow what was happening around me and trying to stay awake. My boss would be typing notes from the interviews in English in her laptop while I looked over her shoulder and tried to follow the conversation.   Even though I did not have language skills, my boss still had me at the interviews to observe and give a fresh perspective to the things that may not be in the discussion and I followed along trying to figure it what it is I should be looking out for.  By the time we got to our second week of interviews, I was armed with some vocabulary I had been amassing and a good sense of rapport with my boss for following information  such that I actually learnt a lot in the field. 

My social interactions have the more entertaining Portuguese struggles stories. 

My coworkers love to tell everyone the story of how a guy came to talk to me at a bar, and of course I masquerade as Brazilian through the first  3 sentences of exchange, with my flawless oi, tudo bem! His next words, " Voce muito Linda..."

 I replied "Não, meu nome é Nancy..."

My friend who had overheard the exchange was cackling in the background.  Turns out, Linda is one of the many Portuguese words that mean beautiful, but it is also a popular  name of a person where I come from. So while this guy was calling be beautiful, I thought he was saying my name is Linda, and I replied, no that’s not my name, is Nancy! Oops.

Then there is the story of my first date.

I am single, and an avid online dater and so are Brazilians with way more apps than I knew in the US. I guess in a city of 11 million people, you cannot have enough ways of meeting people. My first date  though, was a riveting experience. I had started texting with this one guy, in English, who within a few days asked me out to dinner. I complied and showed up on a Sunday evening at this restaurant in my neighborhood. To my dismay, my date did not speak one word of English in person! After my Portuguese vocabulary pretty much finished at tudo bem, and a handful of other phrases, I started thinking of ways of  escaping what was surely going to be a terrible date!  He sensed my unease and convinced  me to stay and it turned out to be a really sweet and “normal” date, that was conducted entirely on google translate. We chatted about normal date things, like our jobs, families and the things we like to do. He even had some good critical thoughts on healthcare in Brazil and he gave me a first glimpse into how normal people experience the massive government funded initiatives that hold up the  Brazil healthcare system.   We downed a couple of beers and laughed and spend two hours together,  all entirely on google translate.  The people sitting around us must have been thinking why these weirdos keep turn their phones to each other haha. Oh well do what you gotta do.

Then there was the time I went to my first Brazilian music party.
 

Friends on the dance floor and beyond

It came  in the form of an invitation to a country club from one of new friends,  Maiara.  She sent me  a few youtube clips to clarify she meant  Brazilian country music and I loved it! The music was very relatable and felt like salsa, except Brazilians dance to it a little different in a series of fascinating swinging moves they call  sertaneja! It made for a fun night of, a live band, caipirinhas and picking up the swing of  Brazilian girls! One thing though, except for my immediate group, noone else in that place spoke English, like I tried to chat people up to no avail. I then lost Maiara somewhere between the bathroom and the dance floor and I went into complete panic mode about my surroundings. A combination of the three caipirinhas I had enjoyed as well as not having heard one word of English in 5 hours, drove my brain into frenzy. Where was Maiara, what happened to her, what if something happened to me and I had no way of communicating it, and nobody understands me ? What if I get into a cab alone and I do not know how to communicate where my home ?  When Maiara reappeared 5 minutes later it felt like forever. The language struggle was more than real that night! 

Me and my work friends at my birthday lunch!

Over the summer I have however gotten to embrace my language struggle. Duolingo was actually a big help in filling up my vocabulary so much that I could understand what people are saying to me even if I cannot reply in full sentences. I became good at a few survival phrases, and my co-workers find in hilarious when I spit out my elementary Portuguese at random times of conversation. On the flip side, I have been a local celebrity at the office. Everyone wants to go to lunch and coffee  with me to practice their English and I am a landmark in the office for where stuff  is, ohh  my desk is two down  by the girl who does not speak any Portuguese. The biggest lesson from my language struggles have been patience, having some and appreciating that of others. Most Brazilians have been willing to help me understand things and I have had to learn to patiently learn and listen to them.  Most of all communications comes in many shapes and forms. I have gotten by with a buoyant personality,  a little Portuguese, a lot of sign language, a lot of reading body language and of course, thank God for technology, google translate cue my date! 

I cannot wait to invite myself to all the Brazilian events back at school to show off my new dancing moves and my Portuguese :)!

On being a good tourist in poor parts of the world!

Hello friends! 

So, I have been keeping a list entitled things to do in Brazil. Every time someone suggests a restaurant, a club, a museum and a food that I should absolutely try while I am here, I whip out my phone and record it! There is one thing I am NOT going to do though.

my Brazil bucket list!

I will not go on a favela tour in Rio de Janeiro.

One of my favorite Internet phenomena of the past year has been a tumblr called “Gurl Goes to Africa.” This blog was a collection of Facebook pictures of “white girls” who went to visit in Africa, for whatever reason, and took these pictures with the “ locals” that they captioned with things like, “These African babies are so much lighter than American babies” and their family and friends commented “ Aww honey we are so proud of you, putting a smile on the faces of these poor African kids.” The onion, America's finest news source summed it up well with the article, “ 6-Day Visit To Rural African Village Completely Changes Woman’s Facebook Profile Picture”.  This blog went viral with criticisms arising from trivial things like why he chose to highlight only girls and more interestingly it sparked a debate on the ethics of volunteerism/voluntourism in poor parts of the world and personal photo journalism that comes with it, including practices such as slum tourism.

If you are not familiar with it, slum tourism is a type of tourism that involves visiting impoverished areas that was originally focused on the slums of London and Manhattan in the 19th Century (thanks wikipedia). "Now, from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising — slums" (direct quote from some article praising slum tourism). Wait, can we take a moment to recognize that early slum tourism was in Manhattan??? Thank you, you may all take your seats now.

Slum tourism is a divisive subject and I have so much to say on it. I worked on this article for two weeks just to try to be as concise as possible. It still ran long but I promise you it is good read, so here goes.

 One school of thought calls slum tourism a clever way of raising awareness of social conditions and poverty to people who would otherwise never know about it. In the 1980s in South Africa, in an attempt to bring global attention to gross human rights violations occurring due to apartheid, black residents brought slum tourism onto themselves, by organizing township tours to educate the whites in local governments and the world about the racially segregated, impoverished districts they were being forced to live in. In that same line of reasoning, to conquer the perception of slum residents as helpless in their situation, Dharavi Tours in India aims to showcase the Dharavi slum in Mumbai as the heart of small-scale industry in the city. Visitors on this tour experience a wide range of economic activities including recycling, pottery making, embroidery, baking, soap-making, leather tanning, poppadom making and many more. In her article, The End of the Developing World, Dayo Olopade wrote about how poor people live in the optimal space of solutions and are entrepreneurs by necessity, because they have to come up with solutions to survive everyday. She even went on to claim a thing or 2 about sustainability could be learnt from these “lean” economies by the “fat” economies of the west, which would a great outcome of slum tourism if ever. As an added bonus some slum tour companies claim to be ploughing back some of their profits to the slum communities they showcase, an arguable point. I mean if they do improve the slums, they will be out of job right?  

The other school of thought is where I stand. Slum tourism at its core is a form of exploitation of the poor and their situation and stories without their explicit permission. Let me set this picture for you.

Some of my African friends and I have a running joke for years now. You know the hungry looking kids in some NGO commercials and brochures, we totally think we could have made the cut.  

I grew up in a middle-income family in a modest neighborhood in Zimbabwe. I was a normal kid whose daily routine after school was change, eat, do my homework and go out to play with my best friend Brenda and other kids on my street. My mother insisted I wear my worn out clothes for these afternoon exploits because I came back home, shoeless,  looking like a little ghost from top to bottom with red clay-caked feet, from running around on the street in the dirt all day.  Two things were a wonder to us growing up, great big cars and white people. They were such a rare sight in our neighborhood that we ran after them in awe if we ever saw one on our street. I do not remember if this ever happened to me, but if any of them ever had a camera, Brenda and I would probably put on these wide toothed smiles and jostle each other to be in the front of a picture.  

The Internet is rife with such images; these smiling kids who have no idea what having their picture taken like that means or where it is going. These pictures are the reason why when I got to college, one of the questions I got from my curious classmates, was “Oh you are from Africa, how does it feel wearing shoes???”  More importantly these kids have no idea what stories are being told about them. My first introduction to one of my favorite writers to date, Chimamanda Adichie, was through a TED talk called The Danger of a Single Story.  It’s a summary of how most of us insist on one lens of looking at the world, and we like to box things and people, especially when they are unfamiliar. The captions on the pictures on “Gurl goes to Africa” tell a story of privilege and people using it intentionally or not to tell other people’s stories who cannot defend themselves. No matter how good the intentions are, the fact of the matter is the poor are often victims in this power  because they do not in turn have a platform to express themselves after all is said and done.

All this is not to say there are no people without food, shelter, and basic commodities and services in Africa, India, and Brazil. They are there, just like there are very poor people in similar conditions in Detroit, Chicago and DC. There are ways of helping them, and snapping pictures of people in these situation and and captioning it, “Look, this is called a camera! I don’t know if you have these in Africa…” is not one of those ways.

For whatever reason people go on slum tours, slum tourism at its core effectively turns poverty into a spectacle and entertainment that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from.  Aside from snapping away at the sight of a half dressed kid in front of a tin house, most of the time the visitors barely interact with residents of slums. Kennedy Odede, a Kenyan who grew up in the Kibera slums in Nairobi, wrote about seeing a group of tourists enter the home of a young woman giving birth in his home in Kibera. They stood and watched as she screamed. Eventually the group continued on its tour, cameras loaded with images of a woman in pain.

What did they learn? 

I can guarantee you they did not chat about the state of healthcare in Kenya and the World Health Organization’s MDG goals of fighting martenal mortality by educating populations about the dangers of births in non sterile conditions, or the cultural significance of a home birth in some parts of Africa, or the role of midwives in these situations, I could go on and on. Perhaps I am too cynical they did, but for like all of 30 seconds, and the rest of the time, they were feeling damn lucky it is not them.

And did the woman gain anything from the experience?  I will leave that to you, dear audience.

My last note, people in extreme poverty exist largely because of the failings of socio-economic and political systems to protect them and provide them with the means and opportunities to get out of these situations. Slum tourism is a display of government failure, and I will never get how governments allow this to occur at all.  Well in Zimbabwe, my government once tried to hide its failures in one Operation Murambatsvina/ Drive out Rubbish, where up to 700,000 people were displaced in what the government called a crackdown on illegal housing. There is an argument that people are poor because they want to be, which is totally not warranted. In a graduation speech a few weeks, Neil Degrassi Tyson said, “We live in a world where not everyone has the urge to help others. ... It is OK to encourage others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. But if you do, just remember that some people have no boots. ”They have no boots and barely a voice to defend themselves when accosted with this depiction of their stories." 

So dear friends, please be good and responsible tourists in poor countries. Think twice before you take a close up picture of the family begging on the streets in Ethiopia, or people picking garbage in Mexico or half dressed children in Rio. They may smile for the camera but you as a person in a position of power should know better than to exploit their image and their circumstances in such a away. Go on your favela tour and get whatever satisfaction you get from it but remember to be respectful of people’s situations and their stories when you document your visit.  Or better just don’t do it, it's in bad taste. 

Now for the big finish, remember Kennedy Odede’s words on Kibera slum tourists, 

“They get a picture, we lose a piece of our dignity.”

Because I had no images to depict this matter that is close to my heart, I will just accost you with a picture of me in front of an awesome graffiti wall in Liberdade, the Japan town of Sao Paulo.  I am still investigating the artwork in this city.

I had to do it! 

 

Adeus USA, off to another adventure!

Nancy Kasvosve

Hello WDI Blog readers. Welcome to the chronicles of my summer in Brazil!

Julio (enroute to Rwanda) and me (enroute to Brazil) at the airport

It is almost surreal that this is my last summer in school, probably forever.  After this I have to become a real adult and get a real job and stop galavanting the world with little to no money! In the meantime I have one more chance to do what I do best, be a "professional foreign person" in yet another part of the world, this time in Latin America.

Let  me introduce myself a little bit. My name is Nancy Kasvosve and I am a dual MBA/MPH student at Michigan.  20 something years ago( not to reveal my age or anything), in a harsh July winter (in recent years I  found out it was not that bad, #thanksChicago), Warren Park Polyclinic in Harare, Zimbabwe delivered a future nobel prize winner into the world.This being her 5th gig of the whole baby thing, three days later early afternoon, my mum walked out of the clinic carrying me, to find  a chaotic house in which my older sisters had not done any chores because they expected her in the evening, when my dad was supposed to pick her up after work.They proceeded to receive the first scolding that they ever blamed on this new baby. My sister who comes before me, has never quite gotten over my dethroning her from being the youngest and family favorite with all of my adorableness and obvious closet geniusness, see what I did there, I just made up that word, thats how clever I am  : ).

Of course I am in the one in the coolest purple glasses of all time!

What am I known for to my family and friends, I am a big challenger of the status quo. My family labeled me the stubborn one and my grandma swore that when I get married my husband’s family will send me back for disobedience. It is apparently a thing in my culture, marriage is a  transaction in which I am a commodity and can be sent back if I am defective.Oh grandma, rest her soul! In any case I have always been a fighter, a believer in that your circumstances do not have to define you or your destiny. I came of age in a harsh time in my country. Once the bread basket of Africa, Zimbabwe withered away in political and economic demise and we were probably the hungriest trillionaires in the world at one point. If you have not heard of us, we are the country that had the highest inflation ever, a few million percent, so much that when we finally gave up on our beloved Zimbabwean dollar in 2008, 1 USD was some 3 billion Zimbabwean dollars,and you needed a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread.

Just casually going to buy a loaf of bread

As if that was not enough, the country was also in public health crisis. The biggest scourge was HIV/AIDS  for which we declared a national emergency in 2002 when the prevalence for our small population of 12 million, was at about 30%. In my high school age group, 1 in every 3 of us was HIV positive.  I have three childhood friends who perished in our teens, and that is where my passion for all things medicine was born. I  was fortunate to "escape" this reality, when I got on a plane and became an undergraduate at the University of Chicago on a full scholarship. I was a hardcore premed and once in love with cancer; like no seriously, I have a favorite tumor. It is called pheochromocytoma, a tumor of the adrenal glands, that causes over- production of adrenaline and aggressive behavior and has been used to justify the actions of hardcore criminals (thanks Dr. House). I was going to be an oncology surgeon until I changed it all around.

I will not bore you with the rest of my resume, but long story short, I am now super into travelling around the world, eating new food (doro wot), hiking up mountains( oh hey table mountain),  taking pictures of art( seriously I will never afford some of this stuff), drinking local cocktails (caipirinhas all day), learning local dances (I am not that great at eskista though) and most of all learning about why everybody, everywhere in the world does not have adequate healthcare and how can we  made this all better! That's right, I am a dreamer, who wants to use modern tools to fix the world, in my case business strategy.  My most recent conquest and  current obsession; eating all of the fruits under the face of the earth in Brazil, drinking caipirinhas as soon as the sun goes down, and having elementary Portuguese conversation with my cab driver and the  kitchen staff at my hotel.

my breakfast for the past week, 4 types of fruit!

My latest healthcare topic is renal disease in Brazil. I am working with an exciting team called Business Model Innovation for the pharmaceutical company Baxter Healthcare. We are building business models to expand Baxter’s footprint in the renal therapy business in Brazil.  I got thrown into the deep end in my first week,complete with 12 hour days in the field talking to various stakeholders  to learn the renal ecosystem.  Even though almost all the conversations around me were in Portuguese, I got a fair understanding of the situation. Being a former clinical medicine enthusiast, my favorite stakeholder is the patient.  Patients with chronic diseases are amazing in so many ways. I got to work with cancer patients previously, and I learnt that when you come to terms with an illness that alters your life in such immense ways, you have to buckle up and live through it. I think humans have more capacity than they imagine they do, especially when faced with hard circumstances in which they virtually have no choice . I know,because I am one of those people that people like to call "amazing" or "strong" when they hear my story. I did not make a conscious choice to be out here fighting for an education and to not see my family for 5 years, circumstances put me here. My plight is nowhere near to what cancer and renal patients have to go through, but I think in life, you get what you get, you are dealt a deck of cards and you cannot fold, you have to play! People who meet me think I am the most positive person ever, that it because I choose to wake up every morning and live through my circumstances and in spite of them.  Most of all, as I have always believed, your circumstances do not define you, it is what you make of them that makes all the difference.

But on a more serious note, what is up with all the amazing graffiti all over Sao Paulo?  I cannot wait to find out!

Perfect graffiti shot with this guy walking by in a Brasilia jersey!