Tag: expat life

5 Ways to Improve Christmas in Brazil
We put our Christmas decorations up this past weekend. This is the first year my daughter has really anticipated decorating and, more or less, helped in the process. She’s very proud of her Christmas decorations, and so am I. They are minimal but were hung with Christmas spirit. And a lot of sweat. Probably more sweat than Christmas spirit for my part.

That’s the problem with Christmas in Brazil. It’s hot. It’s humid. It is decidedly un-Christmasy. At least for someone who grew up spending Christmas a good bit north of the equator.

I tried to recreate my tree decorating memories for my daughter. We had Christmas carols playing. We pulled out the Christmas books and read Rudolph. But everytime I had to stop and rehydrate, the pleas to “Let it Snow” felt more like a cruel joke than an endearing tradition. Not that I’ve ever had a white Christmas in Atlanta, but it’s at least cold enough to necessitate pants.

I can’t shake this feeling that I’m faking Christmas and it’s not just because I’m importing my foreign Christmas culture. Brazil has already imported 90 percent of American & European Christmas traditions. The malls pipe in instrumental versions of American carols, and shop windows are filled with fake evergreens decked out in red, green, and sprayed on snow. Apartment buildings string lights in the shape of icicles and poor Santa greets kids in fur-trimmed, red velvet.

What feels so wrong about Christmas in Brazil is the juxtaposition between Northern hemisphere customs and Southern hemisphere weather. In order to make the season feel more authentic, I’ve got a few suggestions for improving Christmas in Brazil.

5 Way to Improve Christmas in Brazil

This was in October. December is hotter.
1. Put Santa in Board Shorts For his own sake, at the very least. It’s also hard for a parent to explain Santa’s velvet uniform to a kid running around in her underwear. “Yes, it’s very hot here, but Santa is magic and can maintain a constant body temperate even when wrapped in fur under the sun in 98 degrees.” How about some window decals of Santa strolling down the beach in board shorts pulling his sack along on a boogy board.
2. Carols About Sand, Not Snow “Oh the weather outside’s delightful. And the barbecue’s left me quite full. Laying out that’s my plan, In the sand, in the sand, in the sand.” They could also be more local. I think the world needs some Bossa Nova Christmas. “Gifts and fun and family and sunshine. Good will to all, good cheer we keep in mind. We’ll raise some glasses, attend some masses and dine.”
3. Replace Red & Green with Yellow & Blue Look in the store windows and you’ll see red and green wreathes, ornaments, figurines, dinner ware. These colors are too dark and heavy for a place that’s got sunlight until 8pm followed by balmy evenings with temps in the 80s. Christmas in Brazil should be bright and bold. It should be swirled on a sarong that you wear over tanned (or in my case sunburned) legs. I propose Christmas decorations in yellow, for the intense sun, and blue, for the ocean that everyone is visiting on their summer vacations.
4. Exchange Santa’s Sleigh for a VW Bug What good is a sleigh going to be in a tropical rainforest? Or on the sandy coast? Or the sertão, the arid grasslands? No good at all. For a truly Brazilian ride, give Santa a VW Beetle from the 70s pulled by a team of flying capybara. (Someone please draw and post that image!) I’ve seen old Beetles driving around every city I’ve visited in Brazil. Those cars can run forever in any environment. Santa can land in Caracas, send his team of reindeer back to the North Pole with the sleigh, and pick up his Beetle to continue distributing presents in South America.
5. Christmas Palm Trees First, we need to burn all the artificial evergreens that been assembled around Brazil. Most of them are probably made by children in Bangladesh with toxic chemicals. One thing Brazil is not short on is vegetation. No more cheap, fake fir trees. Let’s decorate little potted palms. It’d be a hundred times easier to wrap light around a palm tree. There wouldn’t be room for quite as many ornaments, but I can make sacrifices.
Rabanada. Mmmmmm!

I have no complaints about Christmas dishes. Nuts, pineapple, figs, codfish, ham, and lots more fruit. These are all things I can support. And rabanada. Especially the rabanada! It’s like french toast on steroids. It’s amazing and one Brazilian tradition I’ll be taking back to the US with me.

It’ll be my addition to the dessert table. When else wold you serve bread dipped in egg and covered with cinnamon and powdered sugar? At breakfast?
November 23, 2015
Throwing a Brazilian Halloween Party: An Odyssey of Prep

I threw a Halloween party for fifteen preschoolers last Saturday. It was a huge success, but I feel I owe my guests an apology.

Multiple parents came up to me and said I was “muito animada”, a very fun-loving, party-throwing person. I realized that by throwing a fun children’s party, I had completely misrepresented myself to them. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lie. The fact is I’m not a creative, crafty mom who saves egg cartons to make earthworm condos for the compost pile. My perfect Sunday afternoon is sitting quietly with a good a book and cup of coffee. Ideally on the beach and without people unable to wipe their own bottoms.

So why did I throw a class Halloween party?

Because they don’t traditionally celebrate Halloween in Brazil. I loved Halloween as a kid, and if I don’t throw the party, my Brazilian daughter won’t know one of my favorite childhood traditions.

Why did I make such an effort on the crafts and decorations?

Because the day after I announced my intention to have a party, one of the moms came up to me at school and told me she’d always dreamed of going to a real Halloween party. To which I thought “Oh crap! I’m fulfilling someone’s dream of Halloween? I don’t want that kind of responsibility!” But I accepted it. And that brings us to the last and really most revealing question.

How was I able to come up with such creative and age-appropriate themed snacks and crafts if I’m not a creative crafty mommy?

I’m an intelligent and highly-organized, type-A personality with access to the Internet and a working knowledge of Pinterest. That’s it. That’s the real me. If I take on the responsibility of a project, it will be done well. Even if it’s something I usually avoid.

Like baking.

Let me tell you about the cookie baking.

While in Atlanta in August, I found Halloween themed cookie cutters and decorating supplies. Bat, ghost, and pumpkin cutters. Black, orange, and green slime icing. The kids could decorate cookies! It would be awesome.

I knew I was going to have to make the dough from scratch. Shortly after arriving in Brazil, I tried to bake a pecan pie for reasons again related to culture sharing. I asked my husband where I could buy the crust. He stared at me brow furrowed. “Buy the crust? You mean the ingredients?” I laughed. Ha. Ha. Good joke. I’m not making my crust from scratch. Not even my South-Georgia raised, preserve-making grandmother makes her own crust anymore. Nobody does. “Uh, they do in Brazil.” Oh.

So I knew I was going to have to make sugar cookie dough from scratch and having baked maybe four times in my life, I knew I’d need a practice run. I planned out every day of the week leading up to the party. Saturday I went online and found a simple and well-rated sugar cookie recipe. Sunday I bought the ingredients. Tuesday was the baking run-through.

After my experience with the pie crust, I brought measuring cups back from the US because I’d learned I’m a victim of the US education system and can’t think in metric. Also, the Brazilian versions of recipes often call for “tea cups” which is not a standardized form of measurement! I find baking stressful enough without vague instructions, so American measurements and tools it is.

Recipe. Ingredients. Measuring cups and spoons. I thought I was prepared.

Preheat the oven to 350 F. My oven only has a line decreasing in thickness and the numbers 1 through 5, but my plan was to pick a number and once the first batch was in check them every minute and figure out the right amount of time at that setting. First problem solved.

Mix dry ingredients. Easy.

Cream butter and sugar. That’s when I realized I had a handheld beater with no beaters. They had been lost somewhere between a school project and kitchen renovation. Ok. People were obviously baking before electricity, so I decided to mix by hand. If I had known I would be creaming butter three times in a week, I would have gone out and bought a damn beater right then. But I didn’t.

Fifteen minutes and two sore arms later…mix in dry ingredients.

Two quivering arms and one sore back later…put dough on cookie sheet. Looking at the dough, I could tell using the cutters was out the question. The dough stuck to everything. I could have wallpapered with it. I went ahead and baked globs of it to test the flavor but knew I was going to have to address the stickiness.

One minute of internet research later, I’d learned the dough must be refrigerated for at least an hour before attempting to cut out cookies. Great! I had learned a valuable lesson. This is why test runs are important.

Friday morning I made the dough for a second time, breaking a sweat mixing by hand. I left it in the fridge all afternoon. I was going to bake the cookies after my daughter was asleep, but on a whim I decided to do one batch before I picked her up from school.

Within minutes I learned that firm dough doesn’t stay that way for long in an 85 degree kitchen. Central air conditioning in the kitchen would have been a big help, but I shrugged it off. People baked without air conditioning for most of human history. No big deal. I simply raced, hunched over my kitchen table, to roll out, cut, and dump cookies onto to the baking tray before the dough softened into a gooey mess.

I put cats, bats, and witches’ hats into oven and pulled out 8 amoebas. Son of a bitch.

I collapsed in a chair. Beads of sweat dripped down my back and forehead. My shoulders ached. And the prospect of mixing another batch of dough by hand loomed before me and crushed my soul.

I hate cooking. No matter how much I research and prepare, I feel I always, always, end up facing a dozen unexpected challenges that keep the results from being perfect. And perfect is the end goal, people. And it should be achievable with good planning and organization. That doesn’t seems to be the case with cooking, which is why I hate it.

The silver lining is that by making that test batch before I picked up my daughter, I was able to swing by the store and get more flour and butter for a third batch. Because I was making the cookies. My daughter had already found the cookie cutters and asked for a cat to decorate. I had brought the icing and spider sprinkles from the United States. I was making those damn cookies.

And by 1:12 a.m I had forty cookies in recognizable shapes.

At the party the next afternoon, a mom asked my husband where I bought the cookies. He told her I had baked them. She exclaimed “Really? Oh, those creative moms.”

That’s why I want to apologize to her and the other moms because I’m not the person the cookies make me out to be. I don’t get a thrill from making my daughter’s birthday cupcakes. I get stress knots above my shoulder blades. I don’t jump at every chance to throw a party. I cringe remembering the mess after the last one. I wish my Portuguese was better, then maybe I could translate my sarcasm when I talk about the joys of crafting.

I may have given my daughter wonderful Halloween memories and successfully represented a piece of my culture abroad, but I misrepresented myself in the process.

Which could be true for a lot party hosts. Maybe behind every Pinterest image, there’s a sweaty person popping painkillers and muttering obscenities at a tray of cookies.

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November 3, 2015
My Daughter’s Bilingual. It’s not a big deal.

My Brazilian-American daughter listening to her anglophone Great-Grandmother read Curious George.

About a month ago, I was invited to be interviewed for a podcast with Marianna Du Bosq at Bilingual Avenue. She asked me to talk about raising my daughter bilingual in Portuguese and English, with English being the minority language. (Jargon alert! In the bilingual community, minority language is any language not spoken by the majority of people in the community.) I was flattered and excited. In preparation, I visited her site and pulled up previous podcasts. As I listened to the PhD experts and trilingual parents, the researchers and published authors, I began to suspect that I would be the least helpful person ever interviewed for Bilingual Avenue.

Well the interview is up, and I’m certain that I’m the least helpful guest ever.

Of all the issues that come with parenting my daughter, raising her bilingual is one of the last I think about. In terms of energy usage, reflecting on her bilingualism comes just after flossing her teeth and ahead of which hand she writes with.

I don’t have a favorite book on bilingualism. I don’t have tips or special strategies to share. I can’t list the names of prominent researchers in the field or site the latest journal article making waves. I don’t have a “biggest fear” or “primary concern”. I’m not visiting online forums and sharing my struggles with other parents.

Before my daughter was born I did buy two books on raising bilingual kids. I read enough to know the common strategies: One Parent One Language (each parent speaks his/her native language to the child) and Minority Language at Home (the child learns the majority language at school/in public and speaks the minority language with both parents at home). Our pre-birth strategy session went something like this:

Me: “Since she’s going to be getting Portuguese at school and with all her friends, we should probably speak English to her at home, right?”

My Husband: “Absolutely.”

And that was that. Marianna asked me during the interview how my Brazilian husband feels about speaking English to his daughter. Not to spoil the interview, but I considered revealing my suspicions that I married a robot. He speaks English fluently and wants his daughter to be fluent in both languages, thus the logical choice was to speak English at home. Period. I realize this story is not helpful for the majority of people who also consider feelings when making decisions. I personally would not be able to say “I love you” in Portuguese and feel it the way I do in English, but my husband didn’t give it a second thought.

It’s possible we would have talked about it more, but then my daughter was born seven weeks early. We spent a month in the NICU. She developed a severe food allergy that caused bloody stools until she was 8 months and left me, the breastfeeding mom, only able to eat fruits and vegetables handpicked by fairies and meat that hadn’t been cooked in anything remotely tasty. Her breastfeeding feeding schedule was every two hours, so I didn’t sleep for almost a year. She has severe separation anxiety which has allowed me one night off in over four years, and that night was such a disaster it will take years for everyone to recover enough to try again. When she started throwing tantrums, they included biting, scratching, spitting, kicking, and screaming until she lost her voice. Two years later, we’ve managed to reduce the tantrums to only screaming and throwing toys at doors instead of people. She refuses to try new foods. Iran is more flexible over nuclear policies than my daughter is on the subject of vegetables. And she has recently decided she is done with both school and sleeping.

Truly my daughter speaking two languages is the least of my concerns.

Her teachers report no problems with communication. She has lots of friends she speaks to in Portuguese. She enjoys speaking in English to my parents via Skype. She might have in total fewer words in English than a monolingual her age but so, what? I’m a native English speaker and still regularly have to look up English words I’ve never seen before. With every piece of writing, I learn new ways to use and manipulate my native language. Learning a language is a lifelong activity, not something you need mastered by 18. My kid can identify an armadillo in both English and Portuguese. I’m not worried.

When I do consider her bilingualism and her place in the world as a bilingual, I remember that the idea a child should only have one native language or risk never being fluent in any has been totally and completely debunked. Linguists estimate 75% of the world’s population speaks more than one language and about 20% of the U.S. population. She’s far from alone in her bilingualism. In fact, compared to the many families passing on three or even four languages, our two-language family is pretty straightforward.

I think about these facts for two minutes and then go back to finding a way to make applying sunscreen less traumatic. Which is why, I’m the absolute last parent to ask about raising a bilingual child.

Because when someone says “You’re raising her bilingual. How’s that going?” I say, “Fine. Hey, do you have any suggestions for getting her to not hate carrots?”

*Here is the link to my interview with Marianna at Bilingual Avenue. Episode 87: Learning Language from our Kids with Brynn Barineau

If you have any questions or doubts about raising multilingual kids, Bilingual Avenue is a great resource!!

September 21, 2015
Six Things I learned About My Daughter While Visiting My Parents
Summer in suburban Atlanta

I just returned to Brazil after spending nearly three weeks in Atlanta, my hometown and where my family still lives. It was the first time my daughter and I traveled just the two of us. She’s four. Our trip involved an all-night, nine-hour flight that was delayed two hours both going and coming. I preemptively deployed both the iPad and M&Ms and I’m happy to say that both my daughter and I are going to see our next birthdays. Although probably with a cavity or two. Sanity above cavities, I say.

I don’t know if it was being on active parent duty 24/7 or my daughter’s leap in communicating her feelings and interests since last Christmas, but I learned a lot about my daughter during these past few weeks visiting my parents. Some insights were good, some frustrating, and some have me already looking for methods other than wine to cope with her teenage years.
1. She thinks all kids speak Portuguese. In her day to day life, the only people who speak English are grown ups, specifically my parents via Facetime, my husband, and me. All of her friends, all the kids at school, her cousins in Rio, every single kid she interacts with speaks Portuguese. Naturally, when she approached kids on playgrounds in Atlanta she said “Qual é seu nome?” Every time. Even after I’d tell her “Kids here talk like Mommy. Use English,” she’d continue using Portuguese. On each playground it took a few minutes of the kids not understanding and my prompting for her to switch over to English. Then we’d stop by a different playground a couple days later and she’d say to some kids “Qual é seu nome?” So as far as my daughter is concerned English is the language of authority and Portuguese is the language of her peers. She’s getting to live her own colonial experience. I’m sure that won’t be a problem later.
2. She will eat boogers but not pancakes. And it’s seriously grossing me out. She can’t get enough boogers but she refuses to open her mouth to taste one bite of fluffy, syrup drenched pancake. It’s not just pancakes she refuses to eat. It’s also hamburgers, ketchup, creamed corn, macaroni and cheese, cereal with milk, and scrambled eggs. But boogers she pops into her mouth without a second thought. I’m beginning to think something is wrong with her.
3. She’s never played outside in the dark. I realized this watching her buzz around the Atlanta Botanical Garden while viewing a nighttime light exhibit. I knelt to point out a firefly and realized she had never seen a firefly. We live in a city in an apartment building next to a very busy street. Nature isn’t even in the same zip code. Our city also has unfortunately high levels of violence and crime making the few parks that are here unsafe at night. Running around outside after dark, playing hide-and-seek, capture the flag, or catching fireflies was a HUGE part of my childhood. But hasn’t been and won’t be for my daughter. It makes me sad.
4. If it’s not chocolate, it doesn’t count as desert. She will eat the chips out of a chocolate chip cookie. She will turn down cookie dough for lack of chocolate. She will refuse to part her lips for pound cake. And she will not deign to look at anything called “pie”. Dessert is by definition chocolate. This almost redeems the booger eating.
5. She is stubborn. I knew this about her but sending her to preschool every weekday from 10-5:30 provided a significant buffer that kept me from really understanding the depths of her resolve. If she does not want to do something, she will refuse and she can keep refusing, crying, & screaming for over an hour. I decided she was old enough to start blowing her own nose. She disagreed & snorted snot out of her nose leaving it all over her face & hanging from her chin for over an hour. I told her she had to try one bite of corn in order to get dessert. She refused and demanded chocolate cake repeatedly until long after we’d finished the meal and arrived back home. I told her it was too late to read two bed time books. She screamed at me to read her chosen books throughout my entire going to bed routine and continued after I’d gotten under the covers.
6. She is a one hell of a control freak! She has rules for everything. What cup the juice is in. What order the books are read in. Who takes her to the bathroom. What underwear, what socks, and heaven help the person who offers to put her hair in a ponytail if she’s not in the mood. Everything matters! Everything! And “playing” with her means standing quietly until you are assigned a toy, which hand to hold the toy in, a place to sit, and what you are going to say. And do not screw up your line! If she tells you to say “Hey, who stole my kitty?” do not say “Hey, someone took my kitty!” No improvising! Give dialogue exactly as assigned! She will grow up to be either an award winning director known for making actors cry or dictator of a small Latin American country.
I’m sure summer vacation in December will be full of new insights, although I’m beginning to think ignorance is bliss.
September 13, 2015
Why I’m an Expat in Brazil Part III: Leaving the Friend Zone

Dancing crosses culture and brings people together. It did for my husband and me.

My husband and I never actually dated. Not officially. He never asked me to dinner. I never invited him to a movie. We didn’t sit across from each other in a dimly-lit, over-cooled restaurant asking about family or hometowns between sips of wine. When one of the parties can pull out a two inch file on the other there is no “getting to know you” period.

“So, I’m from Rio de Janeiro originally…”

“Yes, I read that in your program application. I also saw that you got your law degree from a university in Bahia and recently completed your master’s in law at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Changing the subject, your blood pressure is fantastic! Do you have any cardio tips?”

For his part, he’d listened to a running stream of personal revelations from me as I attempted to make each of the Fellows (him in particular) feel at home in DC. I thought the best way to do this was to talk about my parents’ divorce and bring travel photo albums to lunch. He’d met my closest friends within two weeks of meeting me because I’d recruited them to be student hosts for the Fellows, and he met my parents when I brought them along to karaoke with the Fellows at a bar in Adams Morgan.

He may not have had a full medical history for me, but he knew exactly who I was within a month of meeting me: a 22 year-old who excitedly brings her parents out to a bar to show off her new work colleagues.

I hid nothing. I revealed all of me including friends, family, and cat. The only reason I did something as insane as show the HD version of myself from the start is because it was inconceivable that we would end up in a relationship. And I mean inconceivable literally. I did not imagine, envision, or hypothesize any scenario in which we were more than friends. His different nationality and culture had nothing to do it with it. He was…is sixteen years older than I am. His professional career at that point included naval officer and auditor with Brazil’s IRS. My professional title at the time was “Graduate Assistant”. We were at such different stages in our lives that all I had my sights set on was an incredibly impressive letter of recommendation from him at the end of year.

So when my friend confidently told me over dinner one Saturday night “He’s totally going to stick his tongue down your throat.” I replied “Wha…he…I…uh…we…nooooo, he is not.” Because I was both incredulous at the idea and painfully uncomfortable talking about physical relationships. It was a cool evening in early October, and my friend and I were having basin sized salads before I headed out clubbing with some of the Fellows. The Fellows from Zimbabwe and Cameroon were desperate to go out dancing, so I’d agreed to pretend I could dance and go with them. The Brazilian said he’d come too. The plan was for me to meet him at the metro stop near our apartments and head to Dupont Circle together.

“So you’re going to the club together,” my friend concluded. I changed the subject.

We were headed to Cafe Citron, a club I had visited once before, and thought (wrongly) I could get to without directions. After lapping the circle, asking for directions, and finding the other Fellows at the club, we hit the dance floor. This was the part I had been dreading. Besides soccer playing, the only other skill I associated with Brazil was dancing. Samba. The Girl from Ipanema. Carnaval. Bossa Nova. I imagined a country full of people who celebrated soccer victories by literally dancing, extremely well, in the streets. I could handle the “Electric Slide”, the “Chicken Dance”, or a montage from Greece, but as we weren’t at a suburban high school homecoming, I didn’t expect to shine very brightly on the dance floor.

Fortunately, neither does he. The Brazilian doesn’t dance.

Oh, he dances better than I do, but the music and the crowd that night kept things simple and close. I could follow. Not that we danced for long.

I felt the tension from the first sway of my hips. After having lunch together for weeks, I suddenly couldn’t look him in the eye. I looked at his shoulder, just beyond his shoulder, his feet, his forearm, his hand, his chest. Eventually, I was down to body parts that would have been far more awkward to stare at than his eyes. So I looked up. We made eye contact. And he made his move.

His move was confident and calm and so wonderful. It was the unhurried and sure kiss of a grown man. Thank god, we got married because after a minute of kissing, I was spoiled forever for mid-twenty grad students.

We left the club a couple. Not dating. Not open to other people. We left together.

Not that we told anyone. Why cause a fuss if it wasn’t going to work out? But by Christmas break we’d said I love you and it was time to tell my family I had fallen for a Brazilian, atheist, sixteen-years my elder, who was in the states for only another seven months.

It went better than I expected.

August 18, 2015
Why I’m an Expat in Brazil Part II: Between Meeting & Dating

Some very impressive Humphrey Fellows and me.

It is a long way between meeting someone for the first time and marrying him.

I saw my future husband for the second time early the next morning as I collected the entire group of Humphrey Fellows to escort them to their welcome meeting. As an international studies major, I was in quite the fan-girl tizzy over the Humphrey Fellows, specifically the Fellow from Bhutan. There are only about 700,000 Bhutanese in the world, and I was going to work with one! I’d been bringing her up in conversation regularly for months in an effort to compete with my roommate’s stories from her internship on Capitol Hill.

On that typically humid August morning, I found my Brazilian waiting in the dorm lobby next to the Fellow from Kenya. We chatted as the others slowly trickled down. There was a lot of hand shaking and slow pronouncing of names, my own name included. “It’s pronounced like Lynn, except with a Br instead of an L.” “No, it’s not a boy’s name. That’s Bryan, with an A.” “No, I don’t think my parents knew my name would be unpronounceable to, apparently, the entire world.”

Orientation for an international exchange program is probably the most emotionally exhaustive thing a person can go through that doesn’t involve a birth, a death, or a space suit. A person is expected to navigate a new place, new culture, possibly a new language, and new people, all while jet lagged and in some amount of digestive distress from new food. It’s not a vacation. There’s no sleeping in. I met the Fellows in the lobby at 8:45am for a welcome meeting that started at 9 sharp, and from that moment on for the next two weeks, it was a race to get them registered for classes, bank accounts, cell phones, and long-term housing before fall semester began.

Our Fellows had an added emotional blow as they went from being up and coming stars of their respective professions to nobody.

Welcome to Washington DC! It has the highest concentration of PhDs, law degrees and self-esteem per capita of any city in the world. You are now officially unimpressive. You will not have maids. You will not have secretaries. If you don’t know how to send an email or cook, well…we can teach you how to email. Try not to starve.

Undergrads who study abroad don’t have these problems. They haven’t been on their own long enough to be embarrassed by dependency. The Humphrey Fellows however ranged in age from 35 to 50. They arrived for their year in Washington with impressive CVs and very fragile egos. Working with them taught me how to explain what to do with used toilet paper without sounding condescending.

Culture shock and a complete lack of family and friends explain why I, at 22 with the ink still drying on my diploma, was treated by the Fellows as an equal. Nobody asked me to get their coffee. They asked me to explain the online course registration. They asked me to listen as they cried over how much they missed their kids. They asked me to explain the endless variety of milk in grocery stores. At that moment in their lives, they needed an insiders guide to Americans. I was an American with a ~~embarrassingly~~ fortuitously empty social calendar and that huge fan-girl crush on them. I became the group’s cultural wingman.

I started hanging out with the Fellows on weekends. We went to a coffee shop at Dupont Circle for s’mores. We hit some bars in Adams Morgan and tried out an Ethiopian restaurant for lunch. The group changed depending on who had a paper due or a bad case of culture shock, except for one member: the Brazilian. In my memories he’s always there. Always up for anything. Usually available for lunch. He’d rented a basement apartment close to where I lived, and we often ran into each other on the shuttle heading to and from campus.

But I was so hung up on his resume and the sixteen year age difference, I never imagined he actually thought of me as a fellow adult. I was sure the Brazilian, like the other Fellows, was being incredibly polite to someone helping him. When he paid close attention as I took him through every picture from my semester in India, I must have subconsciously chalked it up to good manners because I would never, NEVER, have brought a photo album to lunch with someone I actually hoped to date.

About a month after orientation, the Korean Fellow invited everyone to his apartment for dinner. I clearly remember a few wonderful minutes in the kitchen as the Brazilian taught me how to make caipirinhas and I tried one. I blamed my flushed cheeks on the cachaça. Later a group of us took the subway home. It was several blocks to the metro station, and the temperature had dropped changing my sandals from cute to extremely impractical. My toes were slowly freezing and I probably would have lost a few, if the Brazilian hadn’t stopped, taken off his shoes, and handed me his socks. He gave me the socks off his feet.

And I still didn’t see the first kiss coming. But that night deserves its own story.

August 10, 2015
How I Met My Husband or Why I’m in Brazil

We met, we married, and I moved to Brazil.

Ten years ago today, I met my husband.

He showed up at the office a day early and if he had been less adventurous or more patient, if he had just followed his orientation schedule, I’d probably still be in Washington DC with an impressive career in international education.

He was one of nine mid-career professionals from around the world being hosted by the Washington College of Law as part of the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program. His welcome orientation was scheduled for August 4, 2005. I was spending August 3 sprawled on the floor with my hair in a pony-tail hole-punching, stacking, and assembling orientation binders. At least, that was my plan, but about mid-morning the office manager poked his head into the conference room and told me the Brazilian was at the front desk.

The office manager actually called him, “The Brazilian”. We all did, even program staff at the national level, because no one had a clue how to pronounce his name, which is quite a statement considering the range of nationalities around the office suite. My boss was out of the office, so I got to be the first to hear the correct pronunciation and fail repeatedly to say it. We would be dating before I could correctly say his name.

I saw him as soon as I stepped out of the conference room. He was standing by the reception desk just beyond several ubiquitous office cubicles, including my own, and I thought, “Wow, he’s white. I didn’t know Brazilians could be white.” It was the first in what has turned out to be a lifetime of revelations about Brazil, many of which have revealed an embarrassing number of unconscious assumptions based exclusively on Pelé.

My second thought on seeing him was “He’s really handsome.” My third was “I can’t believe he found this place.” The program office was located in a suite on the bottom level of a building two blocks down from the law school. The suite housed a variety of programs and offices, none of which had found a way to give directions that didn’t get most visitors lost. The Brazilian had successfully navigated the maps and directions while jet-lagged and operating in a foreign language. I was impressed.

But I’d been impressed by him for months. We received a binder on each Fellow that included a medical history, their complete program application with letters of recommendation, and the Fulbright selection committee’s evaluations. The Brazilian came with a letter of recommendation from a Supreme Court Justice and a clean bill of health. Not bad as boyfriend applications go. For my part, I’d been a college graduate for three months.

Truly I don’t know what about me got his attention. Maybe it was my stellar administrative skills or consistent punctuality. Somehow, I managed to make navigating my home country in my native language seem impressive. Thank god for home court advantage.

I wasn’t thinking relationship in that first moment. After recognizing that he was attractive, I went straight to professional mode. I took him on a tour of the school and to the bank. There is nothing romantic about banking or walking around DC at midday in August. Unless pit stains are considered a turn on. We grabbed lunch at the sandwich place across the street where I proved I was strictly business and indifferent to others by ordering the onion smothered Greek wrap. We chatted easily over lunch, and I believe that casual conversation over vegetarian wraps laid the groundwork for everything that followed.

If my boss had been around that morning, she would have been the one to take him to the bank and to lunch. If we had met the next day along with the entire group, we wouldn’t have had the rapport that made me the obvious choice to go with him apartment hunting while the other Fellows opened bank accounts. And if we hadn’t gotten to know one another while touring some rather frightening basement apartments in Northwest DC, it wouldn’t have felt perfectly natural to meet up for lunch periodically over the coming weeks.

By the time we went on our first date, we’d already opened a bank account, shopped for an apartment, and been subjected to a variety of team building exercises together. Rarely has a couple’s compatibility been so thoroughly tested. All we lacked was an astrologer’s blessing.

But all those moments came after that first meeting, when he showed up early and I mispronounced his name exactly ten years ago today.

August 3, 2015
Fortaleza, Brazil: All-I-Can-Take at the All-Inclusive

Vacationing in Fortaleza, Brazil! A lot of a good thing.

I just got back from a family vacation in Fortaleza, Brazil. Our group was made up of three generations traveling from three different cities. It was a great trip and some memories will be with me forever. Which is only slightly longer than all the meat I consumed will be.

If Rio is looking to present an honest and endearing image of itself to the world during next year’s Olympic Games, they should build a barbeque pit in the international terminal and welcome each flight with a free lunch. “Welcome to Brazil! Have a plate of meat!”

A plate of meat, piled as high as it was wide, and a mojito made with a shot of white rum and 32 scoops of sugar was my lunch each day of our stay at the all-inclusive resort. Because once you’ve decided on the all-inclusive vacation, you’ve clearly made self-indulgence your primary goal for the week. No point in trying to hide it under a few leaves of arugula with olive oil.

Of course, visiting an all-inclusive with the entire family does limit the extent to which a person can self-indulge. Vacationing with my only-child who prefers me to any other person in the world, (She’s 4 and hasn’t met a wide range yet.) meant that I did not get the writing and reading time I would have liked. Being unable to pass out under a palm tree with a book on my face due to parenting responsibilities, I compensated by giving my stomach completely uninhibited and unrestrained access to every buffet at every meal.

Puddings, steak, french fries, cakes, risottos, Prosecco, sandwiches, salad, cappuccinos, tarts, omelets, shrimp, cheeses, mussels, chicken, soft drinks, sausages, pasta, mousse, fruit juices, fish, rice, beans, ice cream, croissants, pineapples, and pork were all consumed with reckless abandon. Lunch involved at least three plates; the grilled meat got it’s own plate of honor. Breakfast would take over an hour and I survived the long stretch between lunch and dinner by indulging in the afternoon tea, which included no tea but lots of cake. It was four days of eating as if life was free of consequences. All consumption and no exertion. It was glorious and delicious. I didn’t worry or go to the bathroom from Tuesday to Saturday.

Actually, I did start to worry on Saturday but not because I was feeling awful. I got worried because I didn’t feel awful. My rational-self kept waiting for the effects of my week-long bacchanalia to catch up with me. That part of me knew no person could eat with total abandon for long and not feel utterly disgusting. And that part of me waited. And waited. Meal after meal after, I filled my plate and went back for more, my taste buds rejoicing in how life could be if I didn’t care about staying a size 8 or living past 45, and I felt fine.

Saturday’s lunch was fish stew, fried shrimp, pork chops, rice, and french fries. I ate some of everything washing it down with a Coke. I enjoyed every bite and would have eaten a few more french fries if they hadn’t cleared the plates. On the walk back to the hotel, I wondered if I should seek help.

As we hid out from the tropical sun for a few hours in our room (because too much sun is really terrible for you), the hotel staff dropped off complimentary bottled water and coconut candy. My husband opened up one of the candies, took a small bite, and abandoned it on the table saying “Wow, that is too sweet.” So I immediately went over and finished it.

I popped the last bite in my mouth, swallowed it, and thought “I will never eat anything again.”

With that last bite of coconut candy, I hit my food wall. The full weight of every meal landed on me and left me in a fetal position on the bed. That was it. I was done eating. Possibly for the rest of my life. It took four and a half days, but I found my physical limit for food consumption.

I’m back home and in my normal routine that includes exercise and vegetables. My parents have gone back to the States and my daughter is back in daycare. I’m already looking forward to our next vacation, but perhaps a camping trip would be healthier.

I’ll bring the s’mores!!!

July 28, 2015
28 Days in a Brazilian NICU: The Mom Milking Room

Day 2 of 28 in the NICU at Vitoria Apart Hospital in Brazil.

My daughter was born seven weeks early due to placental abruption. That was a new term for me, placental abruption. Another one was UTIN. That’s the acronym in Portuguese for Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It was one of the many Portuguese medical terms I learned after my daughter spent 28 days in a NICU in Brazil. In the moment, each day felt like a lifetime. I was sure every minute of all 28 days had been seared into my memory.

But they weren’t.

My daughter just turned four, and I’m shocked to realize how much of a blur those weeks have become. Most of the exact numbers are gone. How many days was she on a ventilator? When did she get above 2kg? Of the many people who cared for my daughter, all but one of the names has been erased. Now they’re the doctor with red glasses and the physiotherapist who spoke some English. I suspect these details will disappear too.

What has not faded in any detail, much to my dismay, is my memory of the milking room. This was the place they sent the new moms to strip them dignity. It was the room for hand expressing breast milk.

Many preemies are born too small to breastfeed and are fed through a tube and syringe. How do you get these babies breast milk? The obvious answer is pump it, store it, and serve it. Except the NICU did not allow breast pumps of any kind. The hospital said it could not guarantee that an individual mom’s pump would be sterile, so they could not give the milk from from a potentially unsterile source to the baby. The only way for a baby in the NICU at Vitoria Apart Hospital to get breast milk, other than on tap, was to hand express it. This is as awful as it sounds.

At least for me. I am not particularly in touch with my body. I’m more cerebral and would be quite content to be a floating brain in space except for the facts I do like going for walks and eating french fries. I’m aware that my conscious self is housed in an organic Tupperware container that impacts how I feel, think, am, but I don’t dwell on it. At least not until I get a stomach virus. Or until I have to breastfeed a baby.

And I was going to breastfeed. I had done my research. Despite my lack of emotional connection to my mammary glands, I was totally committed to breastfeeding. I did not, however, anticipate having to milk myself like a cow.

That’s what it is. Hand expressing means squeezing out the milk by hand into a container.

Despite that daunting psychological hurdle, I told the nurses I still wanted to breastfeed, so one of them led me out the backdoor of the NICU, down a hall, through an unmarked door, and into an unused storage closet. Based on the size and lack of any comforts except three chairs, I assume storage closet was the original purpose of the room. White walls, tile floor, no windows, and freezing cold. This was the room I shuffled to, fresh from an emergency c-section, so that I could hand squeeze milk from my boobs.

As I stood there shivering in my hospital gown, the nurse quickly went through the officially sanctioned routine that guaranteed milk I expressed in that closet would be more sanitary than what I could get from a pump: wash hands, don hairnet and face mask, remove the plastic cups from the packaging and take the lids off, wash hands again, wash nipples with gauze, squeeze milk into cup and seal the cup immediately when full. Fortunately, she demonstrated the whole process because to this day I don’t know the Portuguese word for gauze or hairnet.

Then she left. No medical professional stayed in that closet with the moms.

Want to guess how many of the moms expressing themselves actually followed that routine when left on their own?

I know because it turned out to be a communal milking closet, and the answer is none that I saw. The next time I went to the closet, two other women were already there happily chatting away, masks down over their chins. I distinctly remember these two women because they were friendly, completely comfortable being half-naked in front of strangers, and filling up cup after cup with milk like a competition at a state fair. I was none of those things. I struggled to fill half a cup when alone. Trying to hand-express milk in a freezer while confronting small talk in Portuguese and the four largest breasts I’ve ever seen in person was literally impossible.

I got almost no milk out during that session or any other. I subjected myself to breastfeeding purgatory every three hours for four days before finally saying “Enough.” I believe breast milk is ideal. I don’t believe it is worth torture. I restarted breastfeeding only after my daughter was big enough to handle it herself. Hand-expressing in that closet was one of the worst experiences of my life. And I sat through the Sponge Bob movie.

If I’d had any reserve of energy I would have been outraged. I was being denied a breast pump on the grounds it wasn’t sterile, but there was nothing sterile about that room. They sent a bunch of not-medically-trained women down the hall with instructions to wash their hands and wear a mask. I don’t believe a single doctor actually thought the milk coming out of that closet was sterile. They know they’re in Brazil where actual laws are treated as suggestions.

But I didn’t have the capacity for outrage then and I don’t care to feel it now. True, an electric pump and a private space would have made a huge difference, but we all survived and someday the sound of someone else’s breastmilk squirting into a plastic cup will fade from memory. In the meantime, I’ll milk it for the entertaining story it is.

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July 13, 2015