I was lucky enough to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Los Angeles in 1989 when I got the good idea to sell my car and my computer and fly to Salvador, Bahia, in Brazil.  It was the only way I could think of to get some time on the beach and perhaps recover my nervous system and possibly my sanity as well.

I bought a 28-day ticket knowing full well that I would not be returning then, if ever.  I’m an artist and jazz musician and the life of such in the United States is not always a cozy ride if you never developed the skill of marrying well.

I had spent 6 weeks in Bahia three years previously so I stayed with my friend Olga in her condo across from the beach near Itapua’.  I landed a job teaching English at a lovely private school and proceeded to write charts for jazz tunes in my key and look for a guitar player.

Meanwhile, as fate would have it, I arrived in Brazil on the eve of the inauguration of Collor de Mello, the young, handsome, robber president who announced in his inauguration speech that no one in the country could have more than $2500 in their bank account since they were freezing all the bank accounts in an attempt to stop runaway inflation.  Of course the 2% of wealthy people had a hunch that something like this might happen so they took their money out of the bank for a few days, if they even had it in a Brazilian bank. 

The 18% or so of middle class type people were hit hard.  Imagine if you sold your house or your car last week and were about to buy a new one and all the money just disappeared!  Right.  The 80% of desperately poor people were only affected by the fact that the middle class no longer had money to hire them to come and do domestic chores so they were even poorer than ever.

Amazingly, the woman who owned the night club that I ended up singing in on the weekends had taken out her teeny tiny money from the bank the day before the election so she and her brother were able to open a wonderful, small but elegant bar and restaurant across from the beach in Rio Vermelho, on the northern edge of the city.

So I eventually settled in to a routine of teaching classes at the school “English for You,” rehearsing and doing gigs at “Opus 65” with one fantastic guitar player, Mou Brasil, and one or another of several piano players.  I had to move a lot to get an apartment across the main road from the beach. It was lethal to even think about driving a car there, so I rode busses. One year of riding busses in Salvador Bahia used up my entire lifetime tolerance of bus riding. It will never happen again.

But now that you have the picture of my exodus to South America let me relay a few stories of what an incredible thing it is to move alone to a place like Salvador.  I was initiated into South American reality one morning on the way to a teaching job.  Once a week I walked through the city at 5am, past the piles of little homeless children sleeping under stairways and bridges, to catch a bus to COBAFI, a petrochemical company about an hour out of Salvador.  I taught 4 hour-long classes in a row and then was brought back to the city in a taxi. 

On this morning, about a mile from the plant, the bus stopped because the road was blocked by men with machine guns.  The driver opened the door and the men came on board, walking up and down the isles, waving the machine guns and glaring at the passengers who were mostly management from the company.  We had about 15 very long minutes to wonder if they were going to kill us all.  They finally got off the bus and we went on.  Apparently they just wanted to make a statement of how pissed off they were about everything since the new president royally screwed the whole country, and COBAFI was somehow a part of that.

This was an unusual experience for a white girl from the suburbs.  I rapidly lost weight until I was down to 90 pounds.  I’m 5 feet tall but still, this was skinny.  I had promo pictures done with a guitar player and it really didn’t look like me at all.  I had to start a regime of eating ‘coco verde’ icecream every day.  The only time in my life I’ve had to try to put on weight. Green coconuts were a staple food for me in Brazil.  A boy would deliver several dozen of them each week to my apartment and I would whack them open with a machete and drink the elixir of life in the green coco juice.  Then you scoop out the pudding-like green coconut and lie back in your hammock and be so glad not to be grunting through another day in the U.S.

In Salvador there is summer, which is a perfect 75-80 degrees with a lovely breeze blowing at all times.  Then there is the rainy season, a little cooler, and way rainy. Sometimes the water would be up to your knees as you waded out to the bus stop. On one weekend I was blessed to experience the rain gods in a way that I’ll never forget. 

No one ever goes to the nightclubs on the Saturday night until around 11pm.  At 5am, when I was heading out with my boyfriend, it had been raining really hard for an hour and the streets were already covered with about a foot of water.  We got to his apartment building and walked up the cement spiral stairway with a river of water coming down from the roof.  Then we stood on the balcony and watched for hours as the rain came down and the street filled up with another 18” of brown, filthy water.  Finally I thought I should probably try to get to my place before something really drastic happened.  I waded through the streets with water up to my thighs hoping to not pass over one of the many stolen man hole cover holes.  I got to the main street that comes down from the upper city and the buses were stalled with water up over the tops of their tires.  Oh well. I had to go back and wait it out. No way to get through to the other side of Baha, the little yuppie section of Salvador where we lived.

So, the anticlimactic resolve was that by noon the rain stopped, the water went down to the pavement by sunset, and everything was really, really wet.  The little nightclub was filled with mud but the piano was up on a stage and sustained no damage.  It was cleaned out by the following weekend.  I don’t know what happened to the white dog that had given birth to a line of puppies just outside the door of the club.  Her name was XuXa, (shoosha) the name of the beautiful blonde children’s rock star from TV.  I never saw her again.  The current from the upper city washed away quite a few of the favela huts, plenty of street dogs and their debris, and certainly the boxes that formed the home of the insane guy on my block who had been living very comfortably on the edge of the sidewalk.  The city was actually clean briefly.  I’d heard that Salvador was the second dirtiest city in the world after Cairo, and it was nice to have no litter or waste for a few days.

We had a garbage strike once when I was there. Wow. It was very dirty anyway, but with the garbage strike there were mountains of garbage bags piled up on every street as big as the truck that would not be collecting them.  For weeks.  Brazilian garbage has a very high percentage of vegetable matter. Okay. You learn to live with it. 

Then it was my 40^th birthday. I spent the day tripping with the guys who owned the English school and by sunset we thought we’d go up the coast for dinner and music.  The garbage strike was over but in one of the many favelas the garbage trucks refused to go up the hill and collect their bags.  So on this Saturday afternoon the residents decided to take their weeks old garbage bags and throw them into the main north/south boulevard along the beach.  By the time we got there we were driving through a foot of old garbage soup.  I’ll never forget the smell nor the sight of this as we drove off to dinner, as always amazed at the unique experiences to be had in that totally out of control country.

I loved the post office.  In the United States the post office is one of the most uptight, rigidly run organizations in existence.  The first thing I noticed in Brazil is that none of the envelopes have glue on them.  This is because it’s so humid that they would just close up on their own before anyone could buy them. So the tall tables in the entry have glue wells.  It’s a most amazing mess at all times.  You are supposed to run the edge of your envelope over the top of the wheel that goes around in the well of glue, but you could just as easily run the envelope anywhere over the top of the table and it would be enough glue to close the envelope and probably your purse and your back pack and fix your shoes.

Then you would notice the LOUD music. LOUD Brazilian rock and roll or samba but LOUD.  You finally make it through the long line to the window and the clerk is sitting there in skimpy civilian clothes with a drawer open next to her stuffed with wads of money. No order at all to it.  One time I was mailing something in the post office in Baha and the ceiling fell down.  The huge pieces of plaster somehow managed to not bonk anyone on the head but the office was closed for weeks after that for repairs.  It takes weeks to do anything, because no matter what the job, there are never all the parts in one place at one time. Never. So until all the parts get there the workers might as well go to the beach.  This is why the beaches are always crowded.

One thing you do notice about the beaches in Salvador is that they are only crowded around the bahacas. These are little sheds with beach umbrellas where they sell unidentifiable fried things and cachaca, the popular sugar cane liquor, and play LOUD music from the radio on HUGE boom boxes.  Brazilians are a herding culture.  They don’t really like to be alone much at all.  So that’s good news for people who do.  You can always find a long stretch of white sandy beach in the exact middle between two bahacas.  It might even be quiet there.

I was naïve enough to throw away my 28 day plane ticket not realizing that I could have paid a fee and gotten an extension.  So I was busy saving up money for a return ticket when my six month visa was up.  I had to leave the country and reenter to get another 90 days.  I bought a round trip ticket to Ponto Strossner in Paraguay and took 4 days off from teaching.  This is a city at the corner of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.  It’s very close to Iguacu Falls, which is the magnificent natural wonder of the world that was featured in the movie “The Mission”. 

It’s still the wild, wild west in Paraguay border towns.  The streets are lined with makeshift TV tables covered with all manner of cheap junk for the armies of duty free cheap junk seekers that march across the enormous bridge each morning with empty shopping bags.  Black market money changers hang out in ditches with saddle bags full of money doing a whopping good business.  I got a hotel room and went on over to the office to get my visa and started on a 3 day adventure.  First the guy started shouting “So’ trintas dias” over and over again.  Only thirty days.  This is how they really make their living. You are supposed to pay them a tribute so they’ll give you more time.  I didn’t have any more money so I pleaded and he finally agreed to 90 days.  Then he asked me for my picture. What picture. So the rest of the day was spent finding the shop that takes the pictures and getting back over there early the next morning. 

Okay, now where’s your ticket out of the country?  They needed to see my return ticket to somewhere outside of Brazil.  So that day was spent finding a travel agent who would sell me a ticket to Buenos Aires, the closest place outside of Brazil, and then agree to buy it back from me later for a $20 fee.  I don’t speak Spanish, only some Portuguese, so it all took forever.  But finally the guy gave me my 90 day visa and I had one more morning before my return flight to Salvador.  I was able to get a bus to Iguacu and spend about 8 minutes taking in the falls before it continued on to the airport. 

When my 90 days were up I needed more time because I still didn’t have enough money to buy a plane ticket anywhere else.  So my girlfriend, Anna Maria said she could help me out.  She was tall, beautiful, buxom, and had gigantic, curly black hair to her waist.  She said in her intoxicating accent, “Listen to me. We go to the police station right before lunch. I will tell them a long long story about your sad sad situation and believe me they will give you 90 more days. Let’s go.”  So she dresses up in an amazing outfit that is at least 3 sizes too small and exuding Brazilian sexuality from 3 blocks away and we go to the police station.  I am wearing large sunglasses and trying to be invisible.  She roared into that station and we came out a few minutes later with 90 days and several interesting proposals.

By the time I had enough money for a plane ticket to Los Angeles I was also deep into a very dark depression.  Living in a city with millions of homeless children and mangy hopeless dogs was difficult at first, and impossible by the end of my time there.  I was starting to stay in my apartment most of the time.  By then I had a clientele of English students who would come to me at my home.  I was able to make a great living lying in my hammock across the street from the beach speaking English.  I miss my old job. 

My friends said that I must come out on my last weekend there and have some kind of a Brazilian experience.  So I went to the beach with them.  I took a bag with some money and a snorkel and mask and apartment keys and we set up our little camp on a blanket.  I was sitting there with only a string bikini on when the boys came by with a donkey covered with green coconuts for sale.  We all bought one and they stuck a straw in for us to drink from.  Then they waited for us to finish so they could cut up the cocos for us to eat the meat. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the gang was going around behind us cleverly picking up our stuff and nonchalantly walking up the beach with it.  By the time we figured it out, they were long gone.  Now this is a really Brazilian experience.  So I borrowed some money from one of the guys who didn’t get ripped off and set off in my bikini and flip flops to find a phone. I called the guys who owned the English school who also owned my apartment to see if they had another key.  No answer. I left a message and got on a bus to their house. I arrived there but no one was answering the door.  I called them from next door. No answer.  So finally I got on a bus and went back to my apartment. They got up from a nap and got my message and jumped in their car to meet me at the apartment.  When I arrived they had already broken off the only other key in the lock.

So I went to a friend’s house for the night, borrowed some clothes, and met my first student of the day outside my door at 9am.  “What if we have an English lesson about how to go get the locksmith to come to your house and open your door and make you a key?”

On the day I left Salvador I had an early flight to Rio where I would be spending a night with a lovely woman, Celia Leite.  She and her sisters had been the Quarteto in C that did most of the background vocals for Antonio Carlos Jobim, the Pope of Brazilian music. We had a wonderful day set up for us to trip around Rio and see things like the pub where Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes wrote “The Girl from Ipanema” and other national monuments.  In typical Brazilian fashion my plane was late. Eight hours late.  I sat in the terminal and read the only book available in English, a Gore Vidal novel about Aaron Burr. Whoa. Time to get outa Dodge indeed.

I made it to Los Angeles and a friend gave me a ticket to Honolulu and an introduction to a friend of hers who had a couch I could stay on for a while.  I found a nanny job on Maui for a few brutal weeks and then a porch with a hammock for a month until I ran into a friend from New York who happily gave me a ticket to Seattle. During that month I did a massive program of smiling meditations and was able to pull myself out of the deep dark depression.  Listening to the mating song of the whales which can be heard far and wide underwater helped a lot too.  On arrival at my parents house north of Seattle I got a driveaway truck and filled it with my stuff and came back to Boulder, Colorado.  That’s the story of my year in Brazil. 

I highly recommend it as a great adventure no matter what.  I’m so glad I did it then.  I don’t think I could handle it any more.  I’m just so grateful to be in a relatively safe place in my own home, with my own watch dogs and my own satisfying work.  Not long after getting a place on Mapleton Hill (read Fairyland) in Boulder I realized that I was no longer checking out every single car and tree to make sure that no one was hiding there to attack me.  Life in Brazil was ALIVE and MUSICAL and WONDERFUL but dangerous and hopeless for so much of the population. I hear that conditions have improved immensely  especially since Lula has been president and Gilberto Gil is cultural minister. I went there because I love the music and I wanted to help in some way with the homeless children situation.  I realized quickly that there was nothing in the world I could do about this and I also got a big realization about the gift of being American.

Our country was settled by white people from Europe who came here to make a home for freedom, such as they understood it. Brazil was raped and plundered by white people from Europe who went there to take resources back across the ocean.  Growing up in America we have a very real sense of ourselves as free beings with unlimited potential.  Brazilians hope that they will not be raped and plundered any more.  When I asked my English classes if they thought the president would ever give them back the money that was frozen in their bank accounts, they all said “We hope so”.  They had only had democracy for 12 years at the time.  No one really new how it worked exactly.  They all said they missed the dictatorship.  At least then they new what was going on.  I tried to imagine what would happen in the United States if one night the government took almost all the money from the whole country.  I try to use each day to work for global freedom in some way.  No one is free until we all understand and live the unity of all life.  Amen.