Today marks one full week in Brazil. Wow! It has been an amazing experience so far. We started out the day with a lecture from Clarice Mota on the social disparities, racism, & health inequalities in Brazil. It expanded on much of the information we had learned from previous lectures. We talked about how racism is a cycle; racism causes health inequalities and those health inequalities reinforce racism. Racism is still very much present here, even though some will try to say it is not. Before this program, I was not aware of Brazil’s history and their involvement with slave trade. When slavery finally ended, it is often taught that it was out of the goodness of someone’s heart. This is also how it is portrayed in America. The reality is that it was all about the money. The rich do not care about the people, they ended slavery because it was no longer profitable. This made me reflect on how biased the history we were taught in school was. I was always told we are taught history to prevent it from repeating its self and yet we are taught a distorted history that depicts the bad people as good. The whole lecture was great and the class was so engaged, we only got through half of the PowerPoint!
After lunch with our host moms, we met at ICR Brazil for another Portuguese class. We reviewed how to conjugate irregular and regular verbs and practiced a few together. We got to listen to a Brazilian music artist, Marisa Monte. We were given a paper with the lyrics to her song, but with some words missing, and were tasked with filling in the blanks as we listened. I wouldn’t say my Portuguese is good, but it is slowly improving!
With a little more Portuguese practice under our belt, we were off to our next adventure! We met up with Fred, our wonderful tour guide who had also accompanied us on our panoramic tour last Thursday. Today was a historic tour through Pelourinho. But first, we stopped in the Paróquia Nossa Senhora da Vitória Church. Though we had seen the outside many times, we had not had the chance to explore the inside. It was beautiful and it is one of the oldest churches in Salvador.
Our next stop was the downtown area, where we saw the Lacerda Elevator, which connects the Upper City and the Lower City. After our lecture on graffiti and tagging yesterday, I could not help but notice it all around the city, including across from the Elevator. We stopped at a few landmarks within the city as we made our way to São Francisco Church. We first viewed the tile art, where each scene depicted a different phrase, and then made our way into the church. Inside was absolutely breathtaking. The church took 20 years to build and I could understand why once I saw it. There were so many intricate wood carvings, all painted in gold!
Next, we learned about the history of Carnaval at Casa do Carnaval Museum. At the end of the walkthrough, we danced along to traditional music and we ended the visit on the roof top. We made it just in time to enjoy the sunset. As we made our way to our final destination, we stopped to see where Michael Jackson filmed his music video “They Don’t Care About Us”. A cutout of him could be seen on the balcony. Lastly, we visited Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, a Catholic church originally built for and by slaves. This church took 100 years to build! When we arrived, it was so full of people you could barely see inside, but we still got to enjoy listening to the beginning of the service from the sidelines.
Casa do Carnaval Museum
