Curitiba Pilgrimage 3 (11/18 Missão São Pedro and Touring Curitiba)

At Wire Opera: Deborah, John, Michael, and Amber

Missaõ Saõ Pedro

Prayers before altar at Missaõ Saõ Pedro

We slept well and hard.  I had vivid dreams, the detritus of a psyche trying to catch up with 7,000 miles of travel.  I later heard that everyone in the group had a similar experience.  After having told us the night before that they ate simply at breakfast (“café da manhá"), our hosts had a wonderful European breakfast ready for us with plenty of coffee.  We were late getting to Missão São Pedro, and this pretty much set the pattern of being late or off schedule all day.

A van picked us up for our city tour.  Our guides turned out to be our own hosts Cesar and Marcel.  We did a fair amount of walking to begin with, with Marcel pointing out the sites in the old part of the city.  We got distracted easily and separated easily, even though there were only nine of us, which got us further off track and trying to revise plans on the fly, which is never easy with several headstrong adults.  My first day here corrected one misimpression about Curitiba. While I had expected to be in a city where nearly everyone uses mass transit, that turned out to be obsolete information.  One of our hosts explained that as Curitiba’s population continued to grow in the past decade, the middle class got back in their cars, which now choke the streets once again, and have the planners working on a new subway system and more dedicated bus lanes (which are in the center of major streets here, like the streetcars in San Francisco).  We also learned that pedestrians do not have the right of way, which seems to make them, at least the younger ones, more aggressive about wading into traffic anywhere to get across the street.

Curitiba has cobblestone streets that are closed off to car traffic in the city center.  There’s a real European feel to this part of the city, and this is also a region that was settled by immigrants from all over Europe.  We piled into the van, where we frequently misheard each other in conversation, which kept us in laughter. We visited one of the principal sightseeing locations known as the Ópera de Arame, or “Wire Opera House.”  It was built out of steel tubes and glass on the site of a former dump that is now a lush park.  After much discussion, we then went to lunch at a churrascaria.

*Note to Bishop Marc and Sheila and others of their dietary persuasion: You can stop reading here. I will tell you where to start again below.

Anyway, a churrascaria is a barbecue restaurant.  We sat down, ordered some cervejas, and then headed for the buffet.  It was a nice healthy buffet, lots of greens, some pasta, and some cold cuts.  I saw only one piece of roast meat there, which I found easy to skip.  However, the way it worked is that waiters brought the meat to the table.  A new waiter would show up every minute or two with a skewer, a vertical spit really, of roast meat (beef, lamb, chicken, you name it) in his left hand and a carving knife and fork in his right, and then pass from diner to diner asking each if he or she wanted any.  If you said yes, he would deftly carve off a piece in one motion and place it on your plate.  To decline one would say “Não obrigado (obrigada if female)” but the parade didn’t stop until well after we were stuffed and our hosts turned up these little red blocks in the center of the table.  We paid and then had cups of espresso from an urn next to the exit. 

*Okay Marc, Sheila, et al., you can start reading again.

We had one more stop at the Jardim Botánico (Botanical Garden) before our tour ended about two hours late.  Cesar and I went to a supermarket on the way home — variety and prices similar to home. O n the other hand, it’s odd experiencing the combination of people getting ready for the summer and Christmas at the same time.  It’s also odd seeing the sun in the north of the sky.

We went back to Missão São Pedro for an evening service and dinner.  This was the first location of the cathedral — officially the Diocese of Curitiba is only six years old — and it is now a small mission in a very poor neighborhood where the pastor is the Bishop’s sister Revda. Carmen Etel (not to be confused with the Bishop’s wife Carmen Regina, although she often is).  For the service, a three-quarter circle of chairs was set up in front of the altar.  On the floor within the circle were two pages folded out from the diocesan newsletter showing an article about our Diocese and the visit by Bishop Marc and Sheila when the companion relationship was started.  The article was held down by candles and surrounded by pieces of yellow paper on which children from the congregation did drawings and wrote short messages.  Marcel translated and explained some of them to me — they were messages to or about parents who were in jail.  This was the daily life of some of these children in this very poor neighborhood that has serious problems with drugs and violence.

Later during the prayer service, all of the participants were given their own pieces of yellow paper and a magic marker on which to write a short message about the meaning of our companion relationship.  I wrote about learning to talk, listen, teach, and learn together, and our hope of having a third diocese join in this companionship.  I added that I hoped these children would be able to come see us in San Francisco one day.

After the service, more people poured into the church for the social gathering and dinner that was to follow.   We sang some songs, including the Portuguese version of “How Great Thou Art” (the theme song from when Nancy and I made Cursillo). Then there were introductions, with Marcel (did I say that he’s an English teacher as well as a fervent member of Missão São Pedro) translating from English to Portuguese and Portuguese to English.  I delivered my introduction in my halting Portuguese, which violated the protocol of alternating between English and Portuguese speakers, and people asked Marcel if he was going to translate for the rest of our travelling group.  Others said a little about their ministries, including Nancy about campus ministry and Open Cathedral (which we have been translating as church services in the streets), Kate about prison ministry and teaching other aspiring deacons, and Deborah (did I say she is now a psychologist?) about doing bereavement counseling for teens.  As we continued around the room, the Brazilians were saying their ages, and progressively getting younger and younger (25 was popular for people with grown children), all to a great deal of laughter, until one said she was 18, which prompted Carmen to take her beer away because she was now too young to drink.

When we came to Amber at the end, Carmen asked her to say a little about why we are here and to show and explain the labyrinth (signed by many at diocesan convention) that we are presenting to the Diocese of Curitiba.  With introductions finally done, we sat down to a fish dinner cooked by Cesar (did I say that he is also a fisherman and a decent cook?).  We talked and laughed and sang and even did a little impromptu samba well into the evening.  We did not get home until after 11 p.m., which was when I finally had an opportunity to write.  I am now finishing up during our mid-afternoon break before we head off to the downtown to distribute food from the Projecto Padaria.  More on this tomorrow or the next day.