50 miles North of Belem, Brazil, Approaching the Amazon’s Mouth

19 November 2012

When I finished my 30 minutes on the treadmill this morning at 6:45, I walked back toward the bow along the port-side deck. The water was still the deep blue that is characteristic of the oceans, especially in sunlight. And the flying fish were scattering in waves away from the oncoming ship. Now I’m back on my balcony 2 hours later, and the water is aquamarine and quiet. The flying fish are gone. The boobies are gone. Even most of the whitecaps are gone. We’re in the Amazon’s outflow.

According to my National Geographic map of the Atlantic, the outflow from the Amazon River “freshens the Atlantic’s waters 100 miles offshore.” I didn’t expect the change to be so dramatic or so noticeable. But it now looks like we’re sailing over a vast sandbar. And no land in sight. I’m guessing we’ll start seeing some signs of civilization this afternoon as we pass a few of the islands that sit in the river’s mouth. But the actual opening to the Amazon is over 50 miles wide, so it will still seem like we’re at sea, passing by some island outposts. Only when we get to anchor at Macapa, where we pick up the US Ambassador, will it start feeling like a river . . . I guess. We’ll see.

Rio de Janeiro

We arrived in Rio the morning of 11 November, passing the beaches—Ipanema and Copacabana—around 06:30. I wanted to see the arrival (I never get tired of watching a new destination slide by as we approach our dock), especially because those who have been to Rio before said that arriving by sea rivals the arrival into Cape Town or Sydney. It was a clear morning, the sun just starting to rise, as I walked back toward the main dining room. I decided to take a quick look outside on the 6^th-deck portside viewing area, and I walked out just in time to see Sugarloaf go slowly past. It was still too dark to see the Christo statue in the distance. I can’t say that a Rio arrival is more dramatic than a Cape Town arrival, but it certainly is now a part of my mental scrapbook: sights to remember.

I visited Rio about 20 years ago when Steve Ramsey and I went there to conduct some focus groups for Dow Chemical. My memories were of the armed guard Dow insisted accompany us whenever we left the hotel; of the favelas—vast slums of temporary, squatter homes—filling the sides of mountains that surround the city; and of the caipiringhas—surely the world’s greatest mixed drink—that Steve and I enjoyed poolside at our hotel on Ipanema Beach as we tried to record our notes from the morning’s work.  Part of my memory is also listening to Lisa VanderPas, my assistant, laughing as she tried to decipher my slurred focus group notes. “What in hell were you guys drinking?!”

(A lone boobie is back, circling the starboard side of the ship looking for flying fish. Sorry, fella. Your breakfast stayed in the salty stuff.)

After my adventures in Buenos Aires and, especially, Iguaçu, I hadn’t made definite plans for Rio. In fact, I was staring at a virtual pile of formal reports that came in from my business comm. students on the 10^th, so I knew I’d have to spend some time in port grading the 8- to 12-page reports. The students needed them turned around in order to prepare for their final briefings, coming up next. And on the 3^rd day in Rio, I had a field lab scheduled. So I viewed our stay in Rio as more a chance to catch up on work than as a chance for yet more adventure.

Barry Hollar, professor of religion at Shenandoah University in the Blue Ridge Mountains, had set up an independent trip for a small group to visit a Candomble ceremony, a ritual based on African tribal religions that has been kept alive by descendents of the more than 6 million Africans brought to Brazil as slaves between 1500 and 1880. The trip sounded interesting, so I signed up.

After Brazilian customs cleared the ship, I met our group of 12 at the entrance to the port terminal and boarded a van for the drive to the ceremony. Candomble  is an animist religion (I think I have that right). In other words, it centers around nature: the air, the water, the sun, the earth, each (and others) represented by a god. When a practitioner believes he/she is ready to become one with a god (a state that takes time and years of work—sort of like earning a merit badge), she asks for a ceremony where the unification takes place. That’s what we witnessed.

The “church”—a clean, white building that serves as a community center and place of worship—was in a favela north of the city about 45 minutes. We had an interesting tour, in fact, as neither the driver nor our guide was exactly sure where the gathering would take place. But we finally found the place. We entered through a courtyard, where a member of the congregation was selling souvenirs of the ceremony, and were escorted into a large, square room filled with congregants sitting in pews around an open center area. In the middle of the open area stood a post about 18 inches in diameter extending from the floor to the ceiling about 12 feet above. The post was decorated with paintings, fabric of brightly colored cloth, and symbols representing, I guess, the various gods. Clearly, this is the altar.

We sat in the back two rows of pews on the left side of the entry. Across the room, facing us, was a group of musicians playing various percussion instruments—drums, bells, etc—and chanting an African song that repeated the same musical phrase over and over. To the beat of the drums, two circles of celebrants danced slowly around the pole, an inner circle of about 8 or 9 women, and an outer circle of 20 to 25 men and women. The inner circle moved clockwise, the outer circle, counterclockwise. The women were dressed, despite the 90-degree-plus, humid temperature, in several layers of cotton formal wear. Their tops were white, all with a wide sash tied into a bow below their chests. The bottoms were large hoop skirts of various bright colors. And they all wore head-dressings of some sort, mostly small turban-like wraps. The few men in the outer circle were dressed much more comfortably but, clearly, in ceremonial costumes of white or brightly colored tops and loose-fitting pants.

Around and around the pole the groups went for many minutes, chanting with the band, taking ritualistic dance steps, their hands and arms swaying in prescribed patterns back and forth as they moved slowly around the pole. Every few minutes—usually each chant would run at least 10 and as many as 20 minutes—the drumming would stop, the circles would raise their arms in some sort of cheer, the people would wipe the pouring sweat off their faces (no air conditioning in the room), then a cantor would sing the next song’s chant, and the procession would begin again.

This went on for about an hour. Then, suddenly, a woman who had been moving with the inner circle went into what I can only describe as an epileptic-like fit, shaking, eyes rolled back, bent over as if ready to collapse. This, it turns out, was the new inductee. Others in the inner circle rushed to support her as she stood in the middle shaking, arms flailing. Then, as the shaking started to subside, one of the others took the inductee’s sash, which had to that time been tied into a bow at her back, and moved the bow to her front. This, apparently, was the sign that she had now become one with the god.

But that wasn’t the end. The chanting, the moving in clrcles, the stopping and starting, even, to an extent, the occasional “possessions,” continued for the next 45 minutes, when our group decided we’d gotten the gist of the ceremony and headed back to the van. According to our guide, the full ceremony can last as long as 8 hours—until the inductee has been fully inhabited, I guess. He also told us that, in Africa, the ceremony has gone through many changes over the past 4 centuries. But in Brazil, the descendents of the kidnapped Africans retained the original moves, songs, and ceremony elements. It’s a way to maintain one of the links to their heritage.

The other interesting characteristic of the ceremony was that, while most of the celebrants were black, many were brown and even white. That mix reflects the intermixing of the races that has characterized the Brazilian culture over the years. When the Portuguese first came to Brazil and began importing slaves to work the early sugar fields, the Portuguese had left their wives and families at home in Portugal. So intermixing of the races began early. The result is that, today, Brazil experiences far less racism than we do in the US, where slavery began on family-owned plantations. Of course, the US still saw some intermixing, but not nearly to the extent that occurred in Brazil. Today, Brazilians don’t think “races” because the races have become so homogenized. They do think “color,” though. And most of the faces in the poorer neighborhoods of Rio, especially in the favelas, are dark.

We spent the rest of the day having a long lunch and touring a different favela in an area closer to the centro district. Rio has begun a process of what they call “pacification” of the favelas. That means they’ve hired and trained hundreds of new police, who, favela by favela, are entering the neighborhoods, driving out the thriving drug trade, and establishing a very strong presence of flak-vest-attired security guards. Of course, all this is in preparation for the World Cup in 2014 and the Rio Olympics in 2016. They have a long way to go.

On the other hand, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro—at least the ones we were able to visit—certainly have a more permanent, fixed feel than do the townships of South Africa or the poor neighborhoods of Ghana—ironic because, legally, the inhabitants of favelas are all squatters, with no legal property rights. So the government of Rio is spending millions of dollars to pacify, sanitize, electrify, and generally clean up huge neighborhoods that, technically, don’t exist.

After I got back to the ship, I took a quick shower, grabbed a cab, and went across the city to Ipanena, where I joined Jim and Shamim at a restaurant for some feijoada (fezsh-WAH-dah) and a couple of caipiringhas. Feijoada is a Brazilian dish of pork sausage, ribs, and black beans, all cooked together in a casserole and supplemented by various greens, rice, and other side dishes. Delicious!

We took a short walk down Ipanema beach before cabbing back to the ship.

The next day, 12 November, as promised, I spent most of the day in my cabin grading formal reports. Some were very good; some weren’t. I had formed the class into teams and told them they work for a fictitious multi-national company that owns up-scale sandwich shops. The company is considering expanding into one of the countries we’ve visited on the voyage, and the class, working in teams of 3 to 4, were to write reports either supporting or discouraging the expansion. The reports had to be written individually, but they could collaborate on research, organization, even tables and figures in their reports. As expected, the teams that worked together well did the best jobs on their reports; the dysfunctional teams produced weaker reports.

It was a long day, interrupted only by a walk into the city to grab lunch at a sandwich restaurant and to buy a bottle of cashaca, the liquor made from sugarcane that is the not-so-secret ingredient of caipiringhas.

That night, I joined a large group of faculty and staff at Porcao, a well-known Rio restaurant that serves the traditional, all-meat, carved-from-a-spear-at-your-table feast. The dinner was put together by Sergio Carvalho, Brazilian native and professor of business at the University of Manitoba. I hadn’t eaten at a Fogo de Chao in the US (there’s one just off north Michigan Ave in Chicago), so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

The beef was certainly among the best I’ve tasted. And it kept coming and coming, washed down with caipiringhas and red wine. I’m sure my arteries were cracking from the massive infusion of cholesterol. But wow! It was delicious.

On our third and final day in Rio, suffering from a severe meat-and-caipiringha (mostly meat) hangover--I escorted my business communication class on a field lab, that port experience required for each course and, supposedly, tied to the course content. I had been trying since last December to set up a field lab in Rio de Janeiro. I started by trying for a trip to the Embraer aircraft factory east of Sao Paulo. But after several months of back-and-forth communication, both with the Brazil HQ as well as their Ft Lauderdale US office, I abandoned that idea when I realized they weren’t going to fly one of their planes to Rio to pick up and return the class. Besides, my principal contact at Embraer was fired in the middle of the process.

Next, I tried to arrange a day-long visit to the Rio Olympic Committee, figuring their work would be interesting to learn about, could include a tour of projected venue sites, and would be an opportunity to learn about cross-cultural business comm. challenges. But, again after a month or so, I learned through a travel agent that the Olympic committee wasn’t yet hosting visits. So I went through three other possibilities: the World Cup organizing committee, the “Flamingo” football (soccer) team, the Brahma Brewery (a particular favorite idea of the students). All either didn’t reply to my requests or were “not yet” or “no longer” hosting visits. By 2 days before we arrived in Rio, I still didn’t have a field lab set up.

Then Sergio Carvalho came to the rescue. Sergio overheard my story while standing next to me at the bar in the faculty-staff lounge. And he diagnosed the problem immediately: I didn’t know anybody. (I guess the same applies to SAS and to the Brazilian travel agent SAS works through, because they had had no luck either.) Sergio reminded me that in Brazil, a very collectivist, close-knit culture, where personal relationships are everything, to get anything done requires knowing “someone,” meaning a person with influence. The next day, Sergio and I were on the phone from the dean’s office, calling acquaintances of Sergio. By the afternoon of 9 November, he had arranged a morning visit to the world HQ of H.Stern, the jewelry manufacturer; lunch with his own class and a presentation by the Canadian trade representative to Brazil; and an afternoon visit to the state bureau of tourism.

And that’s how to get things done in Brazil!

The day of the field lab was rainy and dull, a good day to spend listening to presentations on making jewelry and on infrastructure improvements planned for Rio before the 2014 World Cup. We also toured a cathedral in the centro section, a very modern, pyramid-shaped structure, ugly from the outside, magnificent inside. Though the Brazilian population is growing increasingly secular, according to our guide, they still love their churches and still call themselves (mostly) Catholic. It wasn’t an exciting day, and it was certainly not what I had envisioned. But we filled the field-lab square, and it was all because of Sergio’s relationships.

We sailed out of Rio’s harbor the night of the 13^th under rainy skies. But the skies cleared just long enough for a final sighting of Sugarloaf, the beaches, and the Christo.

For Manaus, I’m again calling on Sergio, who offered to try to set up an overnight at a jungle lodge for me and a few others. Hope that comes through. And we’re also planning a night at a concert by the Amazonian Philharmonic Thursday (Thanksgiving) evening. But top priority is finding a hotel with good internet so I can wish daughter Julie a happy 40^th birthday via Skype. I know she’ll need consoling.

How does she think it feels to have a 40-year-old daughter?!

The water has morphed from aquamarine to green to tan in the 5 hours it’s taken me to write this entry. We’re now truly at the mouth of the Amazon. And I still can’t see land.