Class Day 3- Julie Dominguez

The more time I spend out of the hotel room the more ignorant I feel.

I don’t mean traditionally ignorant in the sense that I am uneducated or unsophisticated. As I’m discovering the American education system is revered in Brazil. They praise it, and wish to send more of their students to us, and receive our students as an exchange. I mean I live in a world in which I was unaware of how culturally ignorant I am.

Growing up in the USA I feel like Patrick Star, from Sponge Bob. I exist in the world, I function in society, and I can make a living if I choose to come out from under my rock. However, I sit in classes here and I’m coming to terms with everything I didn’t learn.

Each society has it’s own history. I studied Europe and the USA in high school. My mind has never thought to wonder about “middle of the road” countries, even when their history is so intertwined with Europe like ours.

Brazil was a colony of Portugal. Their indigenous population, much like America, are called Indians, because Christopher Columbus believed he found India in the Americas. Not just North America. Here, these Indians still exist as a people, living in tribes in the Amazon.  These people are uncontacted, and that live in a way their ancestors did thousands of years ago.

I had no idea there was a human alive that existed without the internet.

 

In fact, there are 138 estimated tribes living uncontacted in the Amazon rain forest. They have adapted to survive without antibiotics and things, like toilets, that we consider necessary.

It makes my last post seem about how the toilets in Brazil are so different seem insignificant.

This, to me, makes statements about saving the rainforest and our environment so much more meaningful. We aren’t just discussing animals. We aren’t only trying to save trees. People in Brazil, and those that fight for the rainforest, are fighting for people. To save their habitat as well.

Prof. Mello says that Brazilians attempt to leave the indigenous populations alone because they are “innocent like children.” Not young, but learning their own ways, and how to function without the internet or television, a way in which our children, and us, will not grow up.

I was under the impression that all people lived as a sort of civilization, and that hunter and gatherers really only existed in the tropics of Africa and the Sahara, but these people knew standard language, and of societal development. As I’m learning, this is all a factor of geographic development.

In Sao Paulo there are things, like the toilets and favelas that are different. But I could never have imagined indigenous indian’s.

My eyes are being opened like they never have been before. Class is meaningful, changing my perspective, and even the way I see the world.

Tomorrow morning we start early again with Cristina–our instructor for Portuguese. The language is coming slowly, but I can read now, and words are starting to have meaning. I’m by no means fluent, but I can certainly survive, and we’re only four days in. It’s an early night for many of us at the hotel. We are exhausted!

Boa Noite!

Julie