Cachoeira, a waterfall

Last Saturday began the Festa de Ajuda in Cachoeira, Bahia, my current town and love. I woke up at 12 am Saturday to watch the parade begin outside my window with a band and about 100 people running around the town parade (carnaval) style. Every day since, at 4pm, there is another, for lack of a better word, parade, that starts by my pousada, and circles the city, adding people as it snakes around. When it ends at one of the city plazas, there is a beautiful sweaty odor and usually a bloody nose because of some overly-earnest elbow dancing. Each day has a different band, represented by colored t-shirts that are from their neighborhood association. Monday was a parade of Bahianas--traditionally dressed Afro-descendants.




I didn't sleep last night because there was samba from 10 pm until 5 am and I couldn't find a good enough excuse not to participate. At 5am, the "real" party (climax of the week) began with bell ringing, parade gathering and this time, halloween-like dress for the hundreds of participants. Vendors of beer, water, and coke ran down the hill with their carts along with the crowd and I ion't get my foot run over, but I did get a close-up of a real avatar. Real, I tell you. Just look how believable the nose is.

As an added benefit for this lovely day, my American classmate surprise-visited me last night. I returned to my hostel to her sleeping in my room. Thank God for small towns where the question, "at which hostel is the American named Rachel staying?" works better than an address.

And what's more...today was a culinary delicacy. Returned to my pousada at 7 am to guayaba juice, bread, cooked bananas and an egg fried just right. Ate acai for lunch for only 4 reais (What’s up OB Smoothie, What’s up?) and then mid-afternoon snacked on marisoba (I think it's pork. It's really salty and looks like algae). I had two cups of sugar cane juice (squeezed in front of my happy nose...smells like sunshine to me) and a good cup of coffee (in a cute little cup).



Although it's hard to study with constant firecrackers and bell ringing and pagôge-music-from-cars playing, I have learned, as they say here in the rural areas, a "mouthful". Observing at CAPS, the health center for people with mental illnesses, I have fallen in love with my research topic and want to give my whole self to writing my findings in understandable Portuguese. On Friday, we had a "beauty salon" and spent the whole day talking about self-esteem and looking at ourselves in the mirror and asking, "mirror, is there anyone in the world more beautiful than me?" And I cleaned and polished nails, curled hair and laughed hard, hard, hard.

What kind of Brazilian blog would this be if I didn’t mention the beautiful game?

Sunday afternoon we bought scalper tickets for 20 reais (not too good, but that’s what we get for not planning ahead) and watched the Bahian team Vitoria lose to the team from Minas Gerais (Cruzeiros). This is a video from the comparatively empty side where we were sitting. The other side with the local fans was a wee bit more rowdy. It’s funny to hear jeering and cheering in another language and stranger still to see vendors selling acarajé instead of hotdogs.

S-A-J, the locals say

If you’re in Santo António de Jesus, a small city in the interior of the Bahian Recôncavo for two weeks, you might:

1. Watch a soccer in a crowded churrascaría. You might also ordered fried cheese, a real delicacy. Comes on a stick. Eaten with honey.

2. Hang out in the praça (central plaza) and watch teenagers and adults alike drive around and around on their motorcycles, showing off their well-dressed girlfriends. This little ritual can also be preformed with a bicycle, but the same deal with the women: they sit on the back of the bike, legs crossed because they’re wearing a dress.

3. Have churrasco (sort of like a cook-out) with very good friends who also tought us to forró (a dance with two steps to one side and then two steps to the other side. I think it looks like bachata, but everyone else assures me its VERY different.)



4. Have the great privledge of being mistaken for a doctor. “Dotora Raquel, meu joelho está doendo muito.” To which I replied, I have not the slightest idea what to do about your knee, ma’am. Not the slightest. What kind of doctor are you, she wanted to know. The poser kind.



5. Hang out six wonderful days, 8am to 5pm at CAPS, a day center for people with diagnoses ranging from bi-polar to schitzophrenia, depression to OCD. Completely state-funded, CAPS offers activities like gardening and chorus as well as 2 meals, group and private counseling services and meditation, literarcy classes and arts and crafts. The staff of CAPS includes 4 nurses who dispense morning and afternoon medicine, 2 psicologists, 2 receptionists, 2 doctors, 2 cooks, and, depending on the week 8 to 12 interns who coordinate activites (including parties, fashion shows and skits) for the patients (called “users” as an attempt to empower patients to feel like recepients of a service instead of sick people). My friend Megan and I had the extreme (and this is no exaggeration, it was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had here) pleasure of spending almost 9 hours a day talking and dancing with 30 lovely Brazilians that frequent CAPS. Because we’re students, people wanted to help us learn and let us observe anxiety support group meetings, counseling sessions, and injections (in the buttox!). Because the next month of the program is set aside for me to do research on the publically funded mental health care program, this was an absolutely ideal experience for me. My research will focus on the exploratory question of, “how is depression understood in rural Brazil”, giving special attention to stigmas that might prevent people from utilizing the free services available at CAPS. I’ll be stationed at another CAPS in a smaller rural town, also in the Recôncavo, called Cachoeira.