Odd Birds
Of all kinds
Name: Quero-quero or southern lapwing.
Occupation: Looking elegant and ominous with red eyes and a jaunty little feather perched just so on the back of its head. These fearless birds aggressively defend their ground nests. They also have a penchant for hanging out in weird places, like a patch of grass between two roads.
Fun fact: They have little barb-like bones that protrude near their shoulders, and they use those defensively. Imagine a bird coming at you with what is basically two little spears pointed right at you. No, thanks!
It’s been exactly a week since I touched down at the Guarulhos airport in Sao Paulo and was immediately greeted by a cockroach in the airport bathroom.
This sounds strange but I was honestly pleased to be greeted by such a hardy insect. It felt symbolic, even lucky; I need to be like the cockroach myself, more adaptable, flexible, unabashedly able to find a way to keep going. Animals, even and especially the ones that people find disgusting or scary, are the ones that I find the most valuable to learn from. Give me your slimy, your slithery, your multi-legged.
I’m adapting to living here in a small-ish town in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo, a part of Brazil that few gringos go.
“What the fuck are you doing in Leme.”
This is literally what one woman asked in perfect English when she heard me and my person discussing when to pick me up at the manicurist’s studio a few years back. She didn’t ask it with any malice, just aggressively curious surprise.
Leme is not a tourist destination by any means. I find it beautiful in its own way; the skies here are even bigger than in Montana, somehow, and the green sugarcane fields and red soil and plentiful birds and brightly colored walls and houses all have weighty charm, but I get it. This is one of many sometimes aimless, often hick-ish towns that people just kind of find themselves in. I know, because where I’m from we have those by the score, and I grew up in one myself. (Now, the wealthy Paulistanos escaping the city, the ones that are building hideous American-style McMansions on the edge of town, don’t want to hear that, but it’s true.)
So here I am, in a town that feels similar to mine in some ways, but a town where I am somewhat of an odd bird. My thick accent, American way of dressing (Chacos and brewery shirts and cotton dresses ahoy), and glaringly obvious “not from here” vibe is detectable from a kilometer away.
It’s easy to feel untethered from reality here because of this. Right now I am also in that roughly three month period when you move somewhere totally different and many things are gilded and a novelty for you. The money seems fake, the people so nice, the food and the language and all of it so unlike home in a delightful way. It’s all shiny, fun, and exciting. This is what happened when I moved to Switzerland. I couldn’t believe I lived there. Even mundane tasks like buying groceries carried an air of adventure, because in order to do so I had to navigate in a culture and language not my own, and use big colorful bills so unlike my own currency, and take everything up the most gorgeous hill I’d ever seen, while living on the border of two gorgeous nations.
The cracks show later, even in such gorgeous places, but they always show. It’s up to me to decide if they’re foundational or not.
In other news:
Anytime I see a Brazilian person on Instagram or learn about somebody here lauding the US’s illegal attack on Venezuela and removal of Maduro it makes me feel incredibly cynical because of how short and faulty our human memory is. The historian in me feels like I’m breaking out in hives.
The US helped overthrow a democratically elected president here in Brazil in 1964, beginning a dictatorship that lasted decades. Brazil’s dictatorship did exactly what they all do - people disappeared, were tortured, killed. Unions silenced, democracy crushed, censorship abounded. My motherland gladly funded this violent shift.
The US does not, nor has it ever, cared about the sovereignty, democracy, or the wellbeing of other nations or their people. It does not even care about its own people. Seeing folks here act like the US is doing anything for them or is some beacon to look towards is painful. I’m an American citizen, of a nation that don’t have the most basic of things, like healthcare, child care, family leave, or affordable higher education. What we do have, those little crumbs like public lands, voting rights, etc, are being actively hoovered up. If US does not care for its own citizens, why would it give a damn about anybody else? America always has and always will take whatever it wants from anybody, anywhere, and there is no end to its appetite. Venezuela is not a favor or a benefit - it’s letting the world know that the maw could consume any nation next.
It is definitely wild to be here in South America, where pretty much every country has been heavily screwed over by American foreign policy (to put it lightly), and see people still lick America’s boots.