I was invited to a birthday party on Sunday. A well-off lady knew a family in Cajueiro Claro with 4 boys who all had their birthday around October. So she decided to throw them an official Brazilian birthday party.

Official birthday parties in Brazil include huge amounts of decoration, a cake half my size, four or five types of miniature food and drinks, and lembrancinhas for each person to take home. This one also included the Brazilian version of a piñata, which is a clay pot (slightly uncreative, if you ask me).

It was interesting to go into the community on Sunday, their one day off. Everything that needs to get done gets done on this day, especially the socializing. Everyone was out and about; all were dressed in their nicest clothing. But I didn’t feel underdressed in my shorts and t-shirt.

A group of adults were in front of Gustavo’s falling down house, a plastic table drooping under the weight of all of the different kind of alcoholic drinks. They waved, albeit, a little embarrassed. A couple of houses down, the youngest children ran to me enthusiastically, grabbing my knees and waiting for me to kiss them on the top of their heads before they would let go. Milena only lets go when I balance my bag on one arm and scoop her up.

The older children come slower, and the mothers who know me wave shyly, but do not leave their seats. There are only enough seats for 20% of the guests, and they want to keep theirs. There are two grown men at the party: the man who is taking pictures, and Vitor’s dad. The father of the family celebrating their birthday is nowhere to be seen. I scrape my leg on the barbed wire that surrounds their house as I go to get a piece of cake.

I watch the interactions, I see the children who are excluded from the party, watching from a couple of houses down. I listen to the women gossip and I am glad I do not recognize the names. I come and go as I want. I take pictures and hug and kiss and then I am off. Like Junior said, I am a drop of oil in the water, and I like it that way. Then I can’t hurt anyone when I leave. Is that what I am afraid of?

I climbed up a washed out set of steps to see a small depressing house of one light bulb and broken down bricks, half the roof collapsed. Santana has lived here for 30 years. Dogs surrounded, barking me to leave and a wee little woman came out to greet me, the open scab on her forehead distracting every Portuguese word I knew out of my head.

Santana was too embarrassed to let me come into her house. She and I both hemmed and hawwwed a bit, and then she apologized that she had no place for me to sit. She didn’t have any chairs. We did the interview standing up. She didn’t know when her son’s birthday was. No one does. Sometime in the summer, she said…July? And the day? Well, towards the front part. I wrote down July 11. From now on, it will be July 11. Who gave me this power?

Last year, her older son dies of throat cancer. Her 12 year old son is in 1^st grade and cannot read. She doesn’t notice much, because she has never been to school. She knows he is 12, but not what year he was born.

She ‘married’ twice and both were died. Both were abusive alcoholics. The older son works as a motorcycle taxi driver, often shuttling me back and forth to the church when it is worth my time to pay. She cannot talk for long, they have no plumbing, and she needs to walk down the hill to the neighbor to get some water.

I have 12 more minutes of internet if I am going to leave to catch the bus to walk to get to where my host mother is waiting for me at the time I told her. I could just call, but my cell phone was stolen. Stolen and lied to my face about. Then sold to someone else in front of other children who didn’t say anything. And the internet freezes up and I tell myself that minute doesn’t count so I get another one…

Because I just don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about stolen things and broken trust and how hard it is to fix when broken…and all the phone numbers that I’ve lost and how that number is written on 250 business cards. And what if someone calls who wants to donate a million dollars?

“I just need something that is a little bigger than the world I am living in, or I will cry” Is how I feel. And internet is nice like that. It reminds me that I have one friend who has three darling boys. One friend who just had a baby girl. One friend traveling home after a long time gone. One friend to pray for. One friend to laugh with…of course, there is God. He is bigger than the world I live in and I don’t need a little light on my computer to tell me I am connected. Hum.

It is so ugly when someone reprimands you for trusting: “You should have locked your purse up.” Looking at me like it was my fault my stuff was stolen. Those kinds of people need someone to blame to feel better. I understand being careful. I put my things in a back room and closed the door. Sometimes, if someone is determined to steal from you, it is just going to happen.

Worse is the mother of the boy, who knows he did it, but instead lays blame on the church “My children are never going back to that place because all they do is falsely accuse my children of stealing.”

I need to know that God can make something beautiful of this mess. That I am not losing my money and my phone, but am gaining whatever it is that God has planned for this situation. That is what faith looks like right now, and it is hard for me to see.

I’ve been told to lock my purse up now. Behind every locked door is some kind of broken trust, and every time I turn to lock it, I am reminded of that. And honestly, I’d rather lose another cell phone than have to remember that. Trust is such a beautiful thing. Why then, when you are stolen from, does it make trust look so naïve and stupid?

I am transported into a familiar world of longing, empty, hopeful writing. The idea fresh in my head that maybe I can capture just one bit of all the world floating around me and nail it to that piece of paper once again.

It won’t last for long, but God bless it while it is here.

Darn it, they’ve already thought of all the good ways/ideas/forms of writing! What is left for me? Last week I sat on the bed with the two sisters I am living with and we crocheted. They crocheted, and I did the single stitch that I know how to do. Scratch that—they taught me one more. And now, with my new knowledge, I feel the burn to create something new. I, Rachel Winzeler, am going to make the most beautiful crochet bracelet ever imagined. In the next hour.

It didn’t happen. But it is that pull that I have in almost everything I do. To invent something new. Make my mark on the world. To do something truly beautiful. To inspire someone. My two stitch crochet and my writing just reveal this throbbing desire more than other areas. But it is there—always there.

And someday, gosh darn it, I will succeed. In some laughable random way. But I will feel it and will glow about it anyways.

I join the many of my generation and shrug my shoulders because I really don’t give a blink. I am too far away. I only feel a twinge of what I feel because I love my mother and she feels a lot. Politically, I really only care about abortion and libraries.

She squatted on the roots of the tree, the only shade along the road. Brazilians have mastered shadow-finding in the hot sun. She asks me what it is like to be an American. I want to ask her what it is like to live in a house with no bathroom, no kitchen, no running water. She asks me if it is easy to find a job there. I want to ask her if it is easy to raise three children alone in the hard conditions she faces, and where is the man she has spent her love on.

She comments “So that black man is president again, huh?” And I feel something like a twinge of pride. Here, she has found something remotely similar to a connection with me. Something that she feels is a connection at least. America has a black man representing them. A black man who, through all the distortions and lies and truth of news reported and filtered out of the United States and around the world and then translated into Portuguese, represents the common person—someone who wants to help others.

And I could tell her stories, sad stories of things that have happened because of Obama. I could tell her about money and gas prices and debt that makes me sick to my stomach. But instead, I find myself smiling and saying “Yes, he is president again.” Some things are more important. Like finding a connection line between me and her, as we squat under the shade tree.

The father of the family I am living with told me a secret: “Obama didn’t win because he had good policy. He won because he has a good wife. Everyone likes her.” I laughed inwardly but kept a straight face, because for all I know, he is right. I like Michelle. I think his daughters look sweet as well.

“It made me think of my friend Partam from Afghanistan, and a story he once told me of how he and his sisters fled the country. I retold Partam’s story to Erik as best I could, but I knew even as I was telling it that it was expanding, becoming a beast of my own invention. I told the story with the fluid beauty that I remembered it, not with the broken English Partam had used. Partam said he wanted me to write his stories of Afghanistan because he never would. But every time I retold a story, it was reshaped by my experiences, perceptions, and memories. Was I telling the truth? Was my retelling less a “true story” than the original? Was the truth that I found in it different than the one Partam wanted to convey?

He, the absence, had believed that the difference between fiction and nonfiction was black and white, that memory was a machine that recorded mathematical equations. I never managed to be a machine, to capture things exactly as they had been said, and I felt like a failure. My truth was never “the truth”; it seemed as if life had no room for interpretation, for the influence of the invisible, for the ghosts and hauntings and memories that weave their way into human interactions.

When I told him stories about Mexico City, about La Merced, I wanted to capture the way I experienced the chaos, the way I was haunted by the people, and the way they wove themselves into my imagination and my life. There was no single, clean narrative to offer up. In a world that demanded perfection, that asked for machines and mathematical precision and ironed-down eyebrows and perfectly manicured nails, my voice had no place. Truth had a value, but I was sullying it with my memory, with my failure to write down every word, to record every conversation.

My need to communicate with them, to hear their stories, stemmed from an intense yearning to understand what we had in common, how the pressures to be beautiful, make money, and find love (or lust) have driven us to take unexpected measures, to compromise our values and our bodies in some way. Were we women, like the dismembered mannequins on the street, a collection of parts to be made beautiful? In order to communicate with them in an ethical way, I needed to live in La Merced, to spend years in the community, as Maya did, and to contribute to creating meaningful change. I had to ask myself: Did I think that through their stories I would rediscover my own?”  http://matadornetwork.com/notebook/there-is-no-one-story-of-love-lost/

These are the things I feel every time I try to explain Brazil. She just said them better, and I thought you should read it.

This wasn’t how this time was supposed to be. I was supposed to leave everything and be in the middle of nowhere for a month. I’ve been planning for months, I’ve had the idea for years. It is hard to get away.

But I find myself standing on the side of the road again, waiting for a bus or Kombe to take me to the International school. I am wearing my hand washed clothes, but I still haven’t managed to make them smell good. (Marlene can stand next to me and wash clothes, and hers will smell good and mine still smell just a little bit…off).

The family has been more than perfect. And they are better off than I thought—thank goodness we have running water and electricity. The other things don’t really matter if you have that. And having a mom who cooks and cleans and ‘moms’ you—well, it makes anyone feel rich. And the view…wow.

The romantic part of the idea was removed when I realized I would have to come back into town every day to teach English. And back to my apartment at least once a week to arrange things for people, and get supplies. I forgot how many SUPPLIES you need to teach so many different kinds of classes for so many different children. And the trash dump Living Stones on the weekend, and singing in a wedding, and birthday parties…it is always something.

Now it is the thought of all the things I need to get done before I return to the United States. Pressing on me. I am constantly making lists. How is this living in the middle of nowhere? So as a project in itself, I failed miserably. But as living life—it has been a pretty fantastic couple of weeks. And if the goal was to learn, I succeeded. The lessons just looked a little different than I thought.

I have lived much simpler this month. No makeup or jewelry. The same five outfits. Only. One pair of sandals. Always. I wash my own clothes by hand. I use only public transportation. I have limited access to slow internet. Can I do it? Yes.

Can I dress up and put on lipstick and straighten my hair every day?  Yes. I have done that too. And ridden in fancy cars and yachts and eaten at the nicest places. Contrast: July in Hong Kong, October in rural Brazil. Both are me.

Bottom line is this: the thing about being poor is, everything takes extra grace. But the amazing thing about it is that the grace you need is always there—the exact amount you need. I guess that is what makes us all equal in all of the inequalities: the grace we need is always there.

November 2nd. Day of the Dead. NOPE–Picnic time!!:)

It takes extra grace to go back and forth between the world of HAVE and HAVE NOT. Staying at one or the other requires less of me. All the moving around just makes me feel like I am trying to please everyone and failing miserably.

I feel like I am losing grace and getting mad more easily at overly expensive cars, as I wait for the bus on the side of the road. Extremes are so blatant in Brazil. And to see them zooming by in what they don’t need, purposefully not caring about those around them…I cannot excuse them. There is no excuse.

I feel the bitterness growing inside of me…cars too fancy for their own good. People too rich for their own good. The “It’s not fair” echoes in my head. And I have a car; I have chosen this life. Imagine someone who didn’t. Seeing the “Haves” all day. Pass by without even knowing. I think it is the not knowing that irritates the most. How can they continue to be so ignorant to the needs around them?

Where is grace? Where have I let it go? I need it—for me to live and to give. And I think that is what growing up is all about. At least growing up the good way: having 50 things on your plate to do and learning to do every single one of them with grace.

Monday.

1. Washed my clothes by hand

2. Cut down a Banana tree in three swipes with a machete (banana trees grow and produce only one bunch of bananas. Ever. So when the bunch is ready, you have to cut the tree down. Seems slightly wasteful to me…but aweful fun!)

3. Learned to crochet better

4. Taught the family I am living with how to make pizza

5. Sat in a hammock and watched lil monkeys

Ze good life, I am tellin ya!