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Brazil (Part 2)

Read Time: 4 Minutes
NOTE: This blog is a continuation of my last entry.

2. Learning Language

I’ll be honest; I had 2 semesters of Spanish in High School and didn’t really retain much of it because I was too nearsighted to realize how valuable a second language would be.
Nevertheless because I had been exposed to Spanish, and since Portuguese is a Latin based language like Spanish, I found that I had a slight advantage as I tried to pick up a little Portuguese in Brazil.

When learning a language, there is nothing like having a good teacher. What I want to bring to light here is that when you are surrounded by people who speak a specific language, you are surrounded by teachers in that language IF both of you speak one common language and IF you are willing to ask questions such as "how do you say_____" and "what does______mean?"

Since I speak English, all I needed was a local that spoke English and I had a teacher. In fact, I had several of these teachers who were very gracious to answer my constant questions…and it paid off. Here are a couple of examples:

At one point a friend was keeping a secret from me and turned to ask someone else present (in Portuguese) what she should tell me. The other person replied in Portuguese that she should tell me the truth. I caught enough to see what was going on in the conversation and quickly added in English, "Yeah, tell me the truth!"

The best was when I had finished playing one of my last concerts and a 10 year-old boy told me in Portuguese that his dad didn’t have enough money to buy a CD. I was pretty surprised that I actually understood what he said, and so it made my day to be able to give him a CD for free!

3. People are People Wherever You Go

This is something that makes complete sense whenever you or I think about it, but there is something about seeing and experiencing it cross-culturally that presses it much deeper into my worldview.

I made so many friends in Brazil, and I have never been in a place where fewer people spoke my language so I had to observe body language and facial expressions very closely. Occasionally I would have a translator to clarify what people were laughing about or what the real dynamic was among the people I was observing.
Over and over I would see people make the same jokes, express the same emotions, and respond in the same ways that my American friends or I would.

My favorite instance was one evening when I was eating dinner with a group of friends. As long as I had been in Brazil I had been drinking water out of a water bottle while most of my friends were drinking Coke. We had already made a few jokes about it in previous days, and that night one of the guys at the table offered me coke and I motioned to my water bottle to let him know that I had "agua" already.

Now you must understand that this guy is a bit shorter than me but also much more stocky and could probably bench-press 3 times what I could. He shook his head and leaned over to roll up my sleeve a bit and squeezed my bicep as he said "agua." Then he rolled up his sleeve, flexed his massive bicep and said "coke."
We all laughed.

I leaned back a bit, patted my stomach, and said "agua." Then I reached over and patted his slightly larger stomach and said "coke." We all laughed even more.

I felt like I was at home with the friends I had known for ages. It was one of the many priceless memories I brought home.

Yes, we’re all complex, we all have issues, and some of us deviate greatly from what we were intended to be, but there will always be a big circle, a category that we all fit inside, that of humanity.