Curitiba Pilgrimage 12 (11/27, 28 — Going Home, Coming Home)

Goodbye to us and hello to San Francisco (Bispo Naudal and Rev. Roberto)

We actually had a chance to “sleep in,” which for me meant getting six hours of sleep rather than the four to five I’d been getting the last several nights.  Our group originally had planned to host a lunch on Friday, but never got clear on the who, what, when, or where, and decided that our Thursday night dinner at the cathedral should be the formal climax to our companion visit.  This morning at Cesar and Veronica’s house, we spent some time visiting with our hosts in between doing some writing and packing for the flight home.  Nancy and I recognize that we were extraordinarily lucky to be placed with the Pereira family here in Curitiba and the dos Santos family in Cascavel.  We assume the placements had something to do with being the only couple traveling together; but we also happened to end up with people who could speak English — the Pereiras have lived in the U.S., and Marcel is essentially fluent — even though Nancy and I knew more Portuguese than the other members of our group.  This meant that we could communicate and discuss things with our host families that went beyond what was necessary for travel or meeting daily needs.

Cesar and Veronica had special gifts for us, wrapped in fabric rather than paper.  The generosity of these people who had opened their home to us was breathtaking.  Marcel had given us a Brazilian bible before the road trip “to help you with your Portuguese-Brazilian readings.”  Now that we were at the end of our companion visit, Nancy gave Marcel her combination Book of Common Prayer and Bible, a compact yet complete tome that I have only ever seen clergy carrying around.  Nancy now hopes to get a replacement copy from Papei Natal, although Papei Natal is likely to delegate that task to his northern hemisphere cousin Santa Claus. (Papei Natal wears the same familiar red and white garb since his home and toy shop are in Antarctica.  However, as the ubiquitous store and street decorations plainly show, his annual gift-giving jaunt is through a summer wonderland — I started to get used to the sun being in the north, but this . . .)  We headed downtown to the cathedral to get together with the others for lunch and a little last minute shopping.  I tried a credit card purchase at a service station, but my card was rejected — so much for warning Visa/Chase ahead of time that I was travelling to Brasil.  By the time we arrived at the cathedral, Amber had met with Bispo Naudal and Michael and allayed the concerns she was feeling last night.  We first took Melissa and her things to the executive bus stop where she would get a ride to the airport — she was on a different travel schedule and had an earlier flight to catch.  We then drove to the old town section to return to a folk art shop we had visited during our sight-seeing tour the previous week.  This shop was just right in so many ways — the predominant theme was Franciscan and other religious iconography; the items were unique and beautiful but not very expensive; and the profits support a poverty program.

The seven of us (the remaining five members of our group plus Michael and Cesar, who continued as our chauffeur throughout the day) then had lunch at a restaurant next door where we ordered off of menus.  As we were sitting down, Michael preempted any discussion about how to divide the check by announcing that this was his treat.  Michael is here in Curitiba for the long haul — two years he hopes — and served as an important bridge to the people planning our travels around Paraná and as a resource to provide us with context and nuance in relation to the people and things we were seeing.  Part of that meant making sure we did not view everything in black and white.  During our visit we saw Michael gradually recover from the effects of a lingering illness, and he was in especially good spirits today after receiving some very good news about his health the night before.

We still had a couple of more things to shop for, and between the suggestion that we leave for the airport at 4 and my mistaken belief that our flight was at 5:30 rather than 6:30, our leisurely lunch morphed into a mad dash.  In the supermarket we ran into one of the maddening aspects of daily life in Curitiba. Amber purchased three packages of tea for a total price of R$14.98 and handed the cashier in the check-out line a R$20 bill, expecting R$5.02 in change.  It might as well have been a $R200 bill or a $5.00 bill from the U.S.  The cashier did not have the right change in her cash drawer and could not come up with it until she summoned some kind of manager or supervisor who materialized several minutes later with another supply of cash. (We’re talking here about a large supermarket, like a Safeway, with a dozen or more check-out lines and long lines of shoppers at each.  We had also had some far more understandable problems with change at small single cashier stores, with Michael once getting some candy in lieu of small coins.)

Back at the cathedral, Nancy and I dashed across the street to the shopping center and upstairs to pick up our final purchase of some Brasilian football (soccer) jerseys.  We then got into Cesar’s car, still needing to stop by his house to pick up our luggage before heading to the airport.  Did I mention that Cesar is a former police officer?  This gave me considerable confidence in his ability to maneuver through Curitiba’s traffic snarls without hitting or getting hit by anything.  I think I mentioned before that pedestrians do not have the right of way, which results in people just wading into traffic to look for an opening.  They have the familiar hexagonal red signs with the word “Pare,” which literally is a command to stop.  However, all these signs require legally is what we sometimes refer to as a “California stop,” that is, slowing down enough to see if anything is in the way before proceeding through the intersection.

My anxiety grew as time wore on and traffic thickened, though presumably there was a later flight, and we certainly could live with being stuck here if there wasn’t.  At the airport we got into the check-in line a little ways behind Amber and Kate, who had come by cab from the cathedral, and it was only after I pulled out my itinerary that I realized we had plenty of time.  I apologized profusely to Cesar and Marcel for putting them through this mad dash.  After checking our bags and then spending a few more minutes together, we said our goodbyes to Cesar and Marcel and to Deborah, who would be staying over a couple of extra days.

While waiting, now leisurely, for our flight to be called, I decided to pay a last call to the banheiro (if you can’t figure out the meaning from the context, look it up; and if you’re squeamish or offended by a discussion of bodily functions, skip to the next paragraph).  Something Revdo. Sam Dessórdi had emphasized and reemphasized before we left is that Brasilians do not put toilet tissue into the toilet where it might foul up the plumbing system.  It goes instead into the waste paper receptacle that can always be found next to the toilet.  It was a struggle, but I adapted to this system, and now I figured I would know I was back home in the U.S. when I stopped looking for that receptacle.  As I was leaving the banheiro I also saw the guy whose job it was to collect the waste paper from those receptacles — as one of my travelling companions remarked, at least he had a paying job.

The announcements at the Curitiba airport were deafening and only in Portuguese.  Though there was little activity in the waiting area, I thought I heard our flight called a couple of times, and when I went to check the board, it said “last call.”  So we got on board only to find that we had the plane pretty much to ourselves.  So we talked, and waited, and talked, and waited — about 9 passengers altogether on a Friday evening flight to São Paolo on a plane with maybe 150 seats.  After an hour, some more people started to board, and eventually I realized that there was indeed a later flight with which we now had been combined.  The boarding of additional passengers went on for another half hour or so until the plane was full.  We eventually got into the air about two hours after our scheduled departure, and while I had overheard a few rumors from other English-speaking passengers, it was only after we landed in São Paolo that we were told in English that the São Paolo airport had closed off and on that evening due to weather, and that we had been rerouted once in flight before being redirected back to the international airport where we needed to catch our connecting flight.

Despite the delayed arrival, our 11:45 p.m. flight to Dallas was set to leave on time.  Amber and Nancy loaded their baggage on carts and sprinted across the airport, racing each other and dodging people like seasoned NASCAR drivers, to get the bags rechecked on American for the flight home.  This was followed by a slow slog through the Brasilian equivalent of Homeland Security and then the usual security screening, which still left us with a few more minutes for the Duty Free (“Dufry”) shops.

Our flight was indeed on-time, and as far as American Airlines was concerned, we were back in the U.S. as soon as we left the ground — we were assured that we would be violating U.S. law if we tampered with the smoke detector; we couldn’t use Reais to pay for anything in flight; and we could resume putting toilet paper in the toilet.  The flight north was scheduled to take an hour less than our flight south the previous week, and I think we arrived a little early.

The next adventure was temporarily recovering our checked bags and proceeding through U.S. Customs.  Having essentially announced to the world through these articles where Nancy and I had been and what we had been doing the previous week, I figured I had better check the “Yes” box next to the question about whether we had visited a farm or pasture land.  I decided to add a notation that we had thoroughly washed our clothes and shoes afterward (taking joint credit for what Nancy alone had done).  The Customs official who was screening these forms seemed incredulous that I had checked the yes box and then added my own statement to the form.  He sent us sideways to a large mostly empty room that presumably was reserved for people who check a yes box.  We came up to another pair of Customs officials — I thought that maybe they would x-ray or strip-search our luggage or bring out a special dog to sniff it — but they just asked where we had been and what we had been wearing.  I told them I was currently wearing the same pair of shorts that I had worn at the landless encampment; but they said that all they really cared about were the shoes.  I found the plastic bag that contained my Tevas, and handed it over. The officer pulled the sandals out, turned them over, and found some red soil still embedded in the treads.  He then got out a brush, scrubbed the dirt out, dipped the sandals in disinfectant, and handed them back.  He was as friendly as can be.  He looked at the shoes Nancy had worn, said they were clean, and cheerily bid us on our way.  All in all, it was a thoroughly pleasant experience.

We eventually caught up with Kate and Amber in the waiting area for the next flight.  Kate (pronounced “ka-chee” in Brasilian Portuguese, and sometimes also known within our group as “Giggles”) had a very sour look on her face, and I asked her if something was the matter.  She replied, “Yeah, I went on this trip last week, and now I’ve come back a year older.”  I recognized this as a subtle reference to the fact that it was her birthday, and she was right back in good humor.  There happened to be a day spa that was open near our gate, and Nancy and Amber treated Kate to a foot massage, I think because Kate said it was something that always made her laugh.  Four or five hour hours later the four of us were back at SFO where we started 12 days earlier.  We collected our bags, hugged each other, and headed off to our homes.

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Some concluding remarks:

These twelve dispatches have been based strictly on my own observations and impressions from the companion visit.  I told my five travelling companions beforehand that I would be doing this, and along the way I occasionally sought their help or confirmation of some of my recollections.  However, I did not ask them to review or edit my articles, nor did I try to present a consensus or collective recollection.  Had I tried to do so, I never would have gotten anything completed and submitted for posting on diocal.org.

Oddly enough, the first people directly involved with the visit who were able to read my postings were some of our English-speaking hosts in Brasil, including Marcel, Michael, and Bispo Naudal.  The five women with whom I traveled haven’t really had a chance to read what I wrote until returning to the States. Undoubtedly they will remember different things or remember many of the same things differently. (Amber called Sunday night to check in and let us know she had made some bacon popcorn, which is something she and Nancy had bought from a street vendor on our first day in Curitiba.)  I did not take any notes during our visits, but some of my travelling companions did, and their notes and recollections, especially of our meetings with the landless, will be invaluable in terms of developing a far more accurate and complete understanding of what we observed and how we as a diocese might respond.

Last July, Bishop Marc and Sheila Andrus suggested that we approach this visit through the framework of the Millennium Development Goals.   We were frustrated in efforts to raise the MDGs as a discussion topic, apparently because they are known by an entirely different name in Brasil (“Objetivos de Desenvolvimento”), and our translators could not make the connection.  On the other hand, viewing, say, the landless encampments through that prism brings nearly every one of the MDGs to mind.

These articles are only the beginning of our efforts to recount and understand this visit and our relationship with our companion diocese.  The visit was also documented through hundreds of photographs (some already posted on the Diocese of Curitiba’s website) and many hours of video, which hopefully can be pulled together into a coherent presentation.  We learned a lot about how to be church without relying on a lot of resources, and I think we shared a few things of our own about being present as a church for the homeless, students, and others.  I look forward — we all look forward — to continuing this companion relationship and having a chance to welcome some of our Brasilian brothers and sisters into our homes in the coming year.

More remarks:

Lying awake on my second night home (still adjusting to the time change), I wondered if I had talked about where God was in all of this.  One of our complaints about the breakneck pace of our road trip was that it didn’t leave time to stop and reflect on what we had experienced before moving on to the next thing.  Much of my own “free” time was spent writing, often trying to recall the events of a day or two earlier rather than absorbing what I had just been through.

One of the most profound moments that I forgot to write about earlier, but which was emblematic of the spiritual dimensions of this journey, was at the end of our meeting with the boys at the Molivi Center, when Kate led us in singing “Surely the Lord’s Presence is in this Place.”  In a facility that others might regard as a place of shame or despair, we could sense a spirit-filled sense of hope and belonging — not that broken lives had magically been repaired or transformed, but that they could be.  I sensed the same thing in the landless and house chapels we visited — that the divine spirit had bound these people together in self-nurturing communities who, while surely understanding what they lacked in material resources, did not regard that lack as the definition of who they were or as something that should separate them from God or each other.  I think the people we visited were fascinated with street ministry and Open Cathedral here in San Francisco for the same reason — because it is church and a spiritual community for those who, for whatever reason, cannot go into a building.  Isn’t that what the Gospel is about?