Red Meat

I do live in the land of churrascos. Men carrying meat around on big sticks is hardly a cave-woman fantasy around here. And I do eat red meat a couple of times a week. Beans too. Lots of milk. Spinach makes a nice appearance, as do tomatoes and hoardes of garlic.

The problem isn't in the food per se...it's in the quantity. I'm living the single nightmare. The other day, I bought a pack of frozen chicken because it was dirt cheap. But now I don't know what to do with it. Defrosting the whole thing means a week of chicken for breakfast, lunch and dinner and still throwing out a significant amount when it goes bad in the icebox that masquerades as a refrigerator. Chopping off chunks is easier said than done...and then you worry about frostbite...freezerburn...same thing.

It is much harder than it sounds to cook for one. And so I end up eating a lot of...um...bananas. Chocolate milk. Bread and butter. Small insects. (It's the tropics.) I feel bad when I waste food. And I can't seem to retrain myself to not cook for a small army, so I end up eating a lot more carry-out rice and beans than I originally expected when I moved here.

I will be trying your suggestions, especially the vitamin C part. I am beginning to develop a taste for fresh squeezed orange juice and acerola smoothies. One acerola is the size of a Bing cherry and yet contains up to 4.5% vitamin C. A peeled orange is 0.05%. So basically, the tiny fruit packs seriously more bang than a whole bag of oranges...and they say it helps with anemia. So I'll be trying it. But I still think there must be some link between rheumatoid arthritis and anemia and as soon as I'm done here, I'm going to google it...

[Google died on me at this point last night and I performed the stated search...]

Vindicated!!! I don’t know how I missed it before, but anemia is a symptom that tags along with rheumatoid arthritis...so I'm not going to be trying to combat it simply by stuffing my face with meat!!!

Blimp

I’m eating myself into a Halloween chocolate frenzy. I’ve devoured most of my Heath bars and Reeses Miniatures...I have gained weight, which isn’t surprising, seeing as my chocolate stash is significantly depleted.

I’m nervous. I’m agitated. And so I eat...

My friend does have cancer. We just took her to the hospital today and she’ll have a mastectomy tomorrow.

I’m all worn out. It’s been coming for a while...this sleeping-on-the-bus kind of exhaustion, where every day I just want to lock the door and unplug the phone and hide from the world until I stop being so tired...I live by an alarm clock and I still show up a half-hour late to everything.

Anemia is becoming quite the fashion in Manguinhos among the 20-something female population...and I can’t seem to kick it, even with regular doses of vitamins and spinach. Besides bringing a little light to the whole exhaustion thing, anemia is also the best explanation yet for why I am so pockmarked with bruises. Any home remedies I should try???

I have a whole other post to add at this point, but I want to refine it and think through it a little, so you'll have to wait for the deep thoughts from Jenna. Sorry!

My little sister is in Africa alone.

She is wandering through displaced persons camps, which is a kind way of talking about non-homes for the starving and the refugees, the war-broken and traumatized.

Remember her in your prayers.

A very good friend of mine will know with some certainty if she has malignant breast cancer on Thursday. She's 26 and scared and could also use your prayers...

Karaoke Fish Eyes for Okra Fiends

Tiago bought a surprisingly fabulous movie tonight. Like a little dive restaurant that turns out to be the best in town, the cover was less than inspiring. It was called “Duets” and something...a little independenty movie with Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis and a few other people whose names didn’t ring any bells. And it was about karaoke singers. Karaoke contests where the top prize is a whopping five thousand dollars!!! I was totally confused by his movie choice: This is what my darling boyfriend finds interesting? After a steady stream of action flicks, indie films would be nice...but this certainly would not have made my “pick a movie by its cover” list. Which goes to show that first impressions are frequently wrong. I loved it! We both did, actually. Great sound track, quirky story line, intriguing actors. It was made even better by the addition of our dinner menu: fresh squeezed orange juice, rosemary-garlic-lime marinated chicken sandwiches with pan-fried onions, spinach, and mozzarella, and...fried okra! Lightly fried...of course, since I’m not into heart attacks and I want to eat like this for the rest of my life.

Okra is my new vegetable of the month. It has replaced spinach. It has replaced the ubiquitous carrot. Wash, cut, dredge, go...it cooks up fried in a matter of minutes, and makes a wonderfully gooey mess mixed in with chicken and a tomato sauce...I love the little white seed things. They’re simultaneously revolting and curious, an exact visual twin to the inside of a fish’s eye. I know, because we dissected one last Wednesday when Raquel and I refused to eat our fish heads at lunch, preferring to poke and probe at the parts we found too repulsive to eat. The eye was soft and squooshy. With a nudge of the knife, it separated to reveal a tiny white orb, stone hard but which flaked like limestone or chalk when enough pressure was applied. We’re still curious. Is that really what the inside of a fish’s eye is supposed to look like? And if it is, why is it opaque? How do they see? Science majors, assistance, please!

None of this was what I was intending to write about tonight. I wanted to write about how I arrived at the metro station this morning and was reading a sign on my way out of the station when a strange man grabbed me around the shoulders and kissed me passionately.


Tiago looks different when he shaves!

I was surprised, as he had said for me to come straight to the church because he wouldn’t be able to take a few minutes off of work to pick me up at the metro. So that was surprise number one. Surprise number two was being introduced to absolutely everyone at the medical clinic as his “princess” and girlfriend, watching their expressions (it was quite obvious that he’s been talking about me all week), and then getting to listen as they praised him. It’s quite a wonderful thing to have the privilege to hear people honoring someone you care so very much for...but surprise number three really caught me unawares. Usually, Tiago is Mr. Total Professional at work and the best I can get out of him is a wink...he’s the one with more of an American attitude towards public displays of affection now! So having him be so open about our relationship was a bit out of the ordinary. Usually, he’s much more reserved. Tiago was just not quite himself this morning, more agitated and over-loud than I’m used to seeing him. But when he came back into the room after a short absence, and presented me with a dozen roses (pink and red), all was explained! And my face was glowing crimson but for once, I didn’t care.

Tiago is a romantic-in-training. And I am spoiled!

This is a good thing for both parties.... [grinning...]

The Hospital

I’d had such high hopes for this week and the restful possibilities. I was supposed to make yummy good-for-me meals with okra and spinach and kale. They are still sitting in my refrigerator and with luck will not go bad before tomorrow evening. Monday evening we were on the streets when people came by with the news that V- was in the hospital, had given birth to a stillborn seven-month baby girl, and was all alone. R-, her husband/boyfriend, was there, with the guys, huddled around him in their awkward and raw ways of sympathizing. One was singing a situation appropriate but disrespectful funk song. A few other batted around a soccer ball. R's eyes were red and drained and he crumbled under my touch. F- was preparing a little cocaine in a plastic cup. Grief therapy. I went to the hospital but V- was still in the laboring room. The guard looked at my white skin, blue eyes, and accent and gave me a non-invasive once-over. “What relation are you to her?” “I’m a friend...she stays on the street...you could call me a street educator...” “Say that. You’re an “educadora.” How nice, someone in a public hospital wanting to help.... I came back an hour later and they let me go up. We’d left another street friend in the waiting room where she cried deep motherly tears for Viviane and for the memory of her own young baby boy who died only months earlier. The other visitors stared and apparently the guards put her out once I’d gone up, because I walked out an hour later to find her sitting on the steps by the door, my sweater and uneaten cookies in her arms.

Going up into the hospital was odd. V- was lying on a bed in a room by herself, a few curtains offering privacy, the white hospital gown and sheet baggily draped over her frame. Her belly was still large—I had expected to see her little flat stomach again as if magical deflation happened once the baby was gone—and she looked at me in a haze, as if I was the last person she would ever have imagined standing in her hospital room. She complained of bleeding and pain. She let me hold her hand and the tears began to flow...in both our eyes. After a while, I was holding her hand less and she mine more. “Why did God have to take this one thing from me?” So little, they have so little, and this one thing of beauty, this little girl, Vive, whose name means life, so quickly excised from their lives. I had few words to say and so we sat and she asked where the others were and where R- was and if she would be able to see the body. A male nurse harassed her for not allowing them to put in an IV and I began to see life from the rigidly stubborn viewpoint of this tiny teenage mother, her neck scar tight like her eyes when she refused to speak to the nurses. We talked a bit, mostly me, and with gentle persuasion and a promise to go in person to speak to R- if he was there, she allowed the necessary medical procedures. One of the nurses asked me how long I’d known her, and I remembered those first photos of V- in Lapa at the very end of my Servant Team, three years ago.

We visited V- a couple times this week. She's receiving visitors, is healing. If the infection is gone and the treatments she needs are given, she should be able to leave today...pray for them.

Maranatha, Maranatha, Maranatha

I have been appalled since I read a news report on this revenge killing of an Iraqi father and grandfather. We put guns in the hands of men of such little moral character that "I wanted to be part of the team. I wanted to be loyal," and "I knew that we were doing something wrong. I tried saying something, sir" are statements that somehow minimize the gravity of kidnapping and scapegoat killings. Better to be a murderer than a "pussy."

When I read the news, I am ashamed to be an American.

When I read the Bible, I am ashamed to be human. We were created for more.

The Prophets especially challenge and frighten me, because I see my passport's Empire in the spotlight. And I am so very, very thankful that I am a citizen of the Kingdom of God...Caesar only gets the minimum allegiance due him...my loyalty is to an honest kingdom, a righteous king and a reign of justice and peace.

The sooner that comes to earth, the better.

Huh.

I'll try to update a little better, since I have some stolen time before my second church service...

Yesterday, Tiago and I celebrated our three-month anniversary with an amazing buffet of fare from Minas Gerais (his home state) and a trip to the Modern Art Museum. The food was fabulous and gave me a great desire to learn how too make angu and puré de abobora e carne seca...but not desserts. Doce (or dulce, for you Spanish speakers) de leite is NOT dessert unless it is in something. As a stand alone, it is most decidedly disgusting! Most of the “art” was rather bizzare, gory and/or quasi-pornographic (go figure, it’s “modern!”) but there was a wonderful photography exhibition with a couple of Sebastian Salgados that made my day, if not my week. It was the first time I did a double take at a piece of art and thought, “That’s in a book I own...that’s something I’ve admired...and now I’m looking it in the face.” There were just two: one of a child’s funeral in Mexico or Guatemala, and another of a wedding ceremony, the bride tall and gaunt and flanked on either side by Mafia-esque men, who are short and frowning in very un-partygoer ways.

Today we attended the Anglican church. It’s been three years since I visited there; the first time was while on my Servant Team. We’d been starved to hear English, visited and were invited back for lunch by the gloriously English and marvelously crazy, parsonage dwellers. I’d completely forgotten about the church’s existence after that, as it was far away, until yesterday when we passed it on the way home from the art museum. We arrived early this morning because my memory is poor and I thought the sign said 10 am, not 10:30. So we sat under the guardhouse and watched the rain come down...Tiago was a little confused at first, because the Episcopal/Anglican church is liturgical and very similar in some ways to the Catholic church. But we both loved it. Maybe more than I’ll ever be able to put into words. I wasn't looking for an English speaking church, and I certainly wasn’t looking for a group of ex-patriates. But there was this African woman with a tiny hat and wonderfully inviting eyes that I was dying to talk to, and a mother who didn’t feel any shame in slipping her shoes off during the liturgy, and a Reverend who spoke with such a wonderful British accent...we’ll be going back. I need liturgy. I've known that for a long time...I need communal silence with God as much as I need the crazy, dancing, loud singing celebration with the charismatic Baptist church I attend. It’s nice to know that I can maybe have my cake and eat it too...

After church, I signed Erica into the hospital, she’ll have her surgery tomorrow morning. Please pray for her—she’s nervous! Oh, time's running out...more later...:)

Tuesday's child is full of grace??? I think I was born on a Friday...

I went to the streets on Monday with Rich. A very pregnant woman told me my quickly done-up braided hairstyle was ugly and ordered me to take it out immediately, to which another very pregnant woman attempted to “fix” my work. She probably would have been able to do so, had a high teenager with a hair fetish not kept ripping sections out and had my hair been rougher or kinkier or stronger. As it was, she only succeeded in bruising my scalp.

Which adds to the collection I’m calling my “why-it’s-embarassing-to-go-to-the-beach” bruises. I look like a woman who’s been beaten by her boyfriend. I can assure you that isn’t happening. This is all my own CLUMSINESS!!! First, there were the hideous bruises from the painting incident. Then others appeared, tiny ones, on my arm. Maybe from running into doors. Then one on my leg that I can only attribute to scratching really, really hard. And another inexplicable on the inside of my thigh. How does one bruise the inside of their thigh??? Crossing my legs with too much force? Then, on Friday, I was in the bathroom, getting ready to shower, when a mirror fell, pointy corner first, directly onto my foot, leaving a two-inch diameter circle on my foot. A perfect circle in pale purple and green. Is there a medicine you can take for this condition? Something that will make me less of a klutz? Because it’s starting to hurt...and not just my pride.

But back to the streets. On the bus, Rich filled me in on the very best street story I have yet to hear. I was having my hair pulled out while he was talking to M-, so I didn’t get to hear this first-hand. It seems that M- had asked Rich what the going rate from euros to reis was; having determined it was roughly 3-1, Rich asked him why he was interested.

M-: “Well, I ran into this Japanese businessman the other day and I asked him what time it was and he blew me off and that really got me ticked so I robbed him. And I got 500 euros!”

Rich: “Wow, that’s a lot of money. What are you planning to do with it?” It’s better, in situations like this, not to even start in on the morals. The money is stolen, the Japanese is gone. At this point, we’re just concerned about what to do now, in the present. And 1,500 reis is a lot of money. That could just about buy a cheap favela apartment...

M-: “Hmmm. Well, you see, fifteen hundred reis is a lot of money for someone like you but for people like us on the street, it’s really not all that much.”

Rich: “Huh? How’s that?”

M-: “Well, you’re responsible. So you have rent and bills to pay and food to put on the table. But we don’t have anything like that and we’re not responsible. So we’re going to spend it all on drugs and clothing and it’ll be gone in about two weeks!”

Well, that’s honesty. And underscores a need to teach a different way of thinking...

Tonight I took a trip down memory lane...

in the most time-consuming and rather boring way possible. I deleted over 300 emails from the past year that had built up like plaque deep within the bowels of my inbox. The resulting feeling is a bit like cleaning out your closet, only I have a whole lot less to show for it, other than much more space...

I'm praying for good weather tomorrow. I want to hit the beach. But if not, I think we'll probably be going to the museum...I plan on fully enjoying my day off!!!

There is no magical moment

It's been over a week since I wrote here and there was so much to tell...but I keep waiting for that magic moment when I'll have fifteen or twenty uninterrupted minutes to write and collect my thoughts. They're difficult to come by anymore! This entry is simply to reaffirm that I am alive, that I'm happy (I saw Tiago tonight) and that sometime in the future, the hopefully near future, when it is not almost one a.m., I will be updating about all the happenings of the last week, of which there were many.

Until then, peace to you.

There is no magical moment

It's been over a week since I wrote here and there was so much to tell...but I keep waiting for that magic moment when I'll have fifteen or twenty uninterrupted minutes to write and collect my thoughts. They're difficult to come by anymore! This entry is simply to reaffirm that I am alive, that I'm happy (I saw Tiago tonight) and that sometime in the future, the hopefully near future, when it is not almost one a.m., I will be updating about all the happenings of the last week, of which there were many.

Until then, peace to you.