Um Momento em Sao Paulo

Sometimes I remember something from Brazil so vividly, i have to stop whatever i'm doing and just chew on the memory. I've thought about writing about these memories when they happen. But somehow, that seems to take the magic out of it. But if I don't transfer at least part of these random memories into some more permanent form, I realize there will, in time, be no magic left at all for me.

Right now, i'm thinking about standing in the "fundos" (that means the back part) of several houses in my first area in inner city Sao Paulo, waiting for an investigator to let us in. The sky is white and rainy. We've just walked in from the street through a beige door, a skinny alleyway past two or three homes (all connected, of course) and into another labyrinth of interconnected homes in the fundos. People live wherever there is a nook or a cranny. My trainer walks up to the "portao" (the locked gate/door everyone in Brazil has in front of their real front door) and claps loudly. She then raises her hands to her mouth and yells, "Silmara!" We wait a minute in silence. A few curious neighbor kids look at us through their windows. "Silmara!" she yells again, in a way that my still-foreign propriety thinks is too loud. A pretty, brown girl with disheveled, violently curly hair pokes her head out the door. She has a calm, sleepy look on her face. She can't let us in today. We mark another appointment and walk back through the labyrinth of houses to the street.

This is one of the first people i try to visit as a missionary. I like memories of my first area because they are generally untainted by my natural cynicism. Looking back, I know that Silmara was giving us the runaround and that she really just didn't want to see us. But my one-day-old self didn't know that. And that's all right.