Since “blog” brings to mind less interesting images, I’m creating a new word…site-roll (instead of blogroll). Here’s another one for you!
I came across what seems like a very useful site for those looking to teach English in Brazil. The site owner is Danielle and from what I gather, she’s a California native like myself (correct me if I’m wrong) and has been living and teaching in Brazil since April of 2008. That being said, I’m not yet sure where shes located in Brazil but if she checks this out, I’m sure she’ll tell me. Get to know the pitfalls and the victories of going to a foreign country and starting a new career…here’s her site!
As I’m always doing some digging to see who is who out there in the Brazil-related blogosphere and internet, I found yet another informational site, this time on Paraiba! I’m always pleased to see native English speakers and non-Brazilians in general who take a strong interest in Brazil (especially the lesser-known Brazil, also see Recife Guide).
“Choking back tears that had been building up for more than four and a half years, a New Jersey father tried to describe the emotions he felt at finally being able to hold and hug his son and tell the boy how much he loved him.
“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen since his birth. It was incredible. Amazing. I got to see my son,” David Goldman told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Tuesday by phone from Brazil.
The previous day, accompanied by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, Goldman had finally reached the end of a nightmare that began in June 2004 when his wife, Bruna, left with their son, Sean, for a two-week trip to visit family in her native Brazil. She never came back.” – Source
On my site, I normally deal with Brazil-related topics obviously but rarely have I covered Portuguese from other countries. I’d like to do that in a sense, now. Recently, I had to chance to talk a little bit with a woman living in Portugal but originally from Cape Verde and she introduced me to a singer called Mayra Andrade who, in my view, is excellent.
Mayra Andrade (born 1985 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cape Verdean singer who lives and records in Paris, France.
Andrade was born in Cuba but grew up in Senegal, Angola, and Germany. However, she spent around two months of the year in the Cape Verdean island of Santiago. The first song she remembers singing is “O Leãozinho” by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso, whom she has cited as a musical influence. Andrade often performed as a teenager and won the 2001 Jeux de la Francophonie songwriting contest at 16, beginning voice lessons in Paris at 17. During this time, she also met the composer Orlando Pantera and began collaborating with him. Andrade then began to perform in various Portuguese-speaking regions, including the Cape Verdean cities Mindelo and Praia as well as Lisbon. She won the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (English: German Record Critics Award) in 2007. She also won the Newcomer award at the BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music 2008.
Below is a four-part series (each video running around 6 minutes) of Mayra discussing her debut CD called Navega. She speaks in French the whole time but there are subtitles.
“German immigration to Brazil started in 1824 — just after Brazil won independence from Portugal — as a result of Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro I’s (1798-1834) need to populate uninhabited regions of the huge country. Such regions were being disputed with neighbouring countries such as Argentina and Paraguay. Uruguay was just becoming independent. Those countries were by then former Spanish colonies, as all of South America was becoming independent, and all of them were interested in receiving European knowledge, expertise and labor.
Some Brazilian states received higher inflows of Germans than others. Such was the case in Rio Grande do Sul, where the first “wave” of immigrants was settled in the 1820s. In 1827, a group of Germans migrated to Brazil from the region of Trier. This was the first official German migration to Brazil. Part of this group (mainly Catholic married men) came to the farm called “Fazenda Guarei,” which is today a small town in the state of São Paulo called Guarei. These Germans are considered the founders of Guarei.
A second “wave” went to Santa Catarina in the 1850s, but also to Rio de Janeiro, in smaller number, mainly to a city called Petropolis, where the Emperor Dom Pedro II’s summer house (nowadays the Imperial Museum) was located. Other German immigration waves occurred in the 1890s, as well as after the First and Second World War. The latter emigres were not necessarily only refugees, but also people who were tired of the war. They had different destinations: to the states of Sao Paulo, to Paraná, and to the other Brazilian states.
In the mid-to-late-19th century, many German-Russians migrated to the state of Paraná, more specifically, to near Ponta Grossa city, in Campos Gerais region (a savannah). After a failure in wheat cultivation, many re-emigrated to Argentina or the USA.
On August 12, 1950, five hundred Donauschwaben families were invited to immigrate to the region of Entre Rios (Portuguese for between the rivers) in the highlands (1200 meters altitude) of the state of Paraná. The first settlers arrived at the port of Santos, Brazil in June of 1951, settling in Entre Rios with the intent of growing wheat. The area was not prepared for cultivation, there were no buildings at all, nor were settlers exactly welcomed. Rattlesnakes roamed the country. Every couple was assigned 15 hectares of land, with an additional 8 for each son or 4 for each daughter, and a house of either 72 or 42 square meters depending on family size. House and land were assigned on a loan basis; repayment to occur in about ten years time.
The first church was erected in 1957-8. The chief town is Vitoria, others in order of their founding are Jordaozinho, Cochoeire, Socorro and Samambaia. The towns were named for the previous owners of the land, which the settlers were helped to purchase by the Swiss charitable organization Europahilfe.
During the 1960′s, many of the settlers returned to Germany or Austria. Forty-two families left in 1963 alone. As of 1992, only about 5% of the original houses still remained, the rest having been replaced by more permanent structures. About 2,000 of the settlers and their descendants still make their homes here, continuing to speak the donauschwäbische dialect.
Paraná and Sao Paulo have also seen a large number of German immigrants. Through the years, the descendants of these immigrants have spread out to other Brazilian regions, yet the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná are known for their concentrations of German descendants, while in other states there are rather “pockets” of them in cities such as Sao Paulo (capital of Sao Paulo state) and Petrópolis (Rio de Janeiro state).” – Source
(First video in PT)
(Apparently 2:45-2:56 in the video, depicts an Italian dance)
Really Skinny Girl
sung by Caetano Veloso
original by Luiz Melodia
I searched for the Luiz Melodia version but couldn’t find a good version on Youtube. Here it is on Last.fm although I get the feeling even this version is a little different from his 1973 version off of the classic Pérola Negra album.
Motive by Cecília Meireles
Translation by John Nist
I sing because the moment exists
And my life is complete.
I am not gay, I am not sad:
I am a poet.
Brother of fugitive things,
I feel no delight or torment.
I cross nights and days
In the wind.
Whether I destroy or build,
Whether I persist or disperse,
— I don´t know, I don´t know.
I don´t know if I stay or go.
I know that I sing.
The song is everything.
The rhythmic wing has eternal blood,
And I know that one day I shall be dumb:
— Nothing more.
About the Author
Born a carioca (from Rio de janeiro) on November 7, 1901, by the time of the first phase of the Modernist Movement in Brazil, she already belonged to the Spiritualists, a group of writers who were direct descendente of the Symbolists of Paraná. Friend of the Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, Cecilia Meireles has constantly fortered two aesthetic forces in her poetry: tradition and mistery. Perhaps the most dedicated craftsman of the generation, greatly amired in India, Israel, and the Latin countries of Western Europe, she has created a dozen of volumes of lyrics so limpid and intense as to be the envy of her male contemporaries. These volumes, collected in Obra Poética (1958), run to better than a thousand pages. The union of such quantitly with such quality is one reason why she has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize. – Source
Lets lighten up the atmosphere after the story that came yesterday, shall we?
“SAO PAULO (Reuters) – A Brazilian judge awarded $2,600 (1,824 pound) in damages to a man who sued a store for not replacing his faulty television set, ruling that it was an “essential good” needed to watch soccer and a popular reality TV show.
The customer took Casas Bahia, Brazil’s largest furniture and home appliances retail chain, to court for “moral damages” inflicted by not being able to watch television.
“In modern life, you cannot deny that a television set, present in almost all homes, is considered an essential good,” ruled the judge from Campos, a town north of Rio de Janeiro.
“Without it, how can the owner watch the beautiful women on ‘Big Brother,’ the national news broadcast or a football game,” the judge quipped.
Brazilians are passionate soccer fans and are currently following the ninth season of the local version of the popular reality TV show “Big Brother.”
Great! Now there’s stare decisis for this kind of ruling. Personally, I see television as an ‘essential’ disease pushed by the people at the top in order to dumb us down. The only thing that should be allowed onto TV are shows that teach you something, but even with that, you’re left with following “the experts” and rarely deciding issues for yourself.
If you are just waking up, you probably don’t want to read this. This is the caption I would have liked to have read above the story which I translated below. Some people are just sick. It’s way beyond my comprehension why this needed to happen to two people, most likely in love, enjoying a weekend in another city. The majority of the 130 comments left on the original story call for the death penalty to be allowed into the Brazilian Constitution.
CURITIBA – The weekend was marked by a barbarous crime in Paraná. A couple fell victim to a fake tour guide, who shot the boyfriend to death and then shot the girlfriend twice and raped her. Ozires del Corso, 22 years old, and his girlfriend, 23 years old, headed up a trail in the Morro do Boi, right next to a crowded beach, guided by a man who offered to show them the way. After 15 minutes of going up the hill, the couple was taken aside by the guide, who was armed.
Since they didn’t have any money, they were taken to a grotto. The man shot them both because they wouldn’t let him rape the girlfriend. Ozires died on the spot. The girlfriend was seriously hurt. The assassin escaped but returned at night in order to rape the woman.
Update: It seems the morro was not a favela but rather just a hill, next to a popular beach, which contains a grotto that many tourists to the area like to see. The police department has a large group of officers, investigators, etc working on the case and they believe the t-shirt of the offender has been located. The female victim, whose name is Monique, is recovering from her injuries in Curitiba and is no longer at risk of dying. Ozires, who was a law student, came to the area with his family and his girlfriend during vacation. – Source (PT) with video
Over on Get Brazil, there’s a documentary posted which apparently aired on BBC World late last year, which deals with verme (worms) that enter the human body and feed off the host. The problem is especially bad in certain regions of Salvador, where half of the documentary takes place. The first half deals with ringworm and the second half focuses on hookworm (in Minas Gerais). I believe the latter is called bicho de pé (foot bug) in Portuguese.
Here’s the description from Rock Hopper TV, where it is hosted…
“In Brazil, millions of people are infected with intestinal worms. Although there are effective drugs to treat worm infections, they’re not universally available and can’t prevent future infections. Now a team of scientists are trying to develop a vaccine against one of the most damaging parasites, hookworm. It will be the first vaccine against a multi-cellular organism.”
If it gets taken off of Get Brazil for any reason, here’s the direct link. Running time is 45 minutes.
My Take
Well, its definitely not a simple issue. Unfortunately the regions reflected in the documentary are poorer areas where health education is lacking, which leads people to keep hold of their old ways and superstitions rather than accept modern science. Second, new treatments are rarely cost-effective and the charities are too few and far between to help everyone. It could be said that a national donate-extra-pairs-of-shoes campaign might benefit the children of the affected regions more so than the actions of one charity. The other major thing that needs to change is the complete lack of basic sanitation.
As for the opening of the documentary, it tries to connect Salvador as a whole, to the worm problem and in turn, say the effect of the infections are seen in the natural low energy vibe of the people of Salvador…something a bit too generalized for my taste. Other than that, its interesting to watch.
