3 Weeks and Settling pt 2.

Hi everybody! It’s time for an update, I think, before Gram wonders why she bothered bookmarking this website. I’m heading into my 4^th week here in Rio, and it feels on one hand as though I just got here, and on the other as though I have been here forever.

I think I’m finally pretty well adjusted. I know that “adjustment” will continue up to the day I leave, but I am settling in a lot more manageably than I was. The first couple of weeks here were a difficult, between the language adjustment being harder than I thought, work at the CTO (Center for Theater of the Oppressed) starting off a little more slowly than I expected, and the shock of having so much time on my hands, much of it looking like it would be spent alone. I had known before coming that being alone was going to be a challenge for me, but it hit me pretty hard when I got here. I’m not used to having time on my hands, and certainly not time alone. I’m a compulsive communicator who rarely turns off her phone or goes an hour without some interpersonal exchange. I don’t currently have internet in my apartment, so my communications with people in the U.S. are restricted to day time at work, where it’s hard to have phone conversations in the open office, and the occasional evening when I can join one of my roommates, at the language school where they volunteer, to use the wireless there. I was really missing people a lot more than I had anticipated, particularly Bryan. It was difficult to have a conversation with anyone from home without crying, and the long distance relationship thing was feeling impossibly painful. Suffice it to say that, while I was making friends at work and found my roommates to be nothing but friendly and welcoming, the solitude was a bit of a cold-water shock for the first week or two.

Week 3 was a bit of a transition week. I started feeling more comfortable- going to Capoeira (a sort of brazilian martial art) lessons, taking the bus instead of the subway and therefore getting a better sense of the city and the people (and realizing I could never ever drive in this city), and starting our first major activity at work. We had a week long workshop with people who have been previously trained in Theater of the Oppressed (TO) in order to use it in local mental health centers. Part of the Brazilian mental health system (Saude Mental) consists of smaller centers located within communities, called CAPS- a lot smaller and more personal than large institutions. The people participating in the workshop are professionals who already worked in CAPS, then were trained to bring TO into the CAPS. At this point, all of them have been working with TO in their own centers, and are also starting to train other “Multipliers” to do the same with other groups. This workshop, then, was to serve as a clarification, development, practice of the techniques and a forum for discovering how to pass them on in a way that’s specifically designed to work in the mental health environment. We were scheduled for the workshop from 10-6, Monday-Friday, culminating at 6pm on Friday with the presentation of the Forum Theater play that we developed over the week. Time in Brazil being a bit more of a fluid concept, we usually got rolling at about 10:45, 11, and took an hour lunch break that turned into an hour and a half each day. J The workshop was really a fantastic experience. Some things that I saw were not entirely new, as I’d seen them in some form or another during the Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed Conference in Minneapolis, but even in those things that were not necessarily new, I learned more about how or why it’s done, and got to see differences between styles of usage, etc. And there was also a lot of new material- a lot of exercises that fall under the “Aesthetics of the Oppressed,” which is a relatively new area in the ever growing repertoire of TO work. (speaking of which, if anyone is interested in learning more about TO and doesn’t want to wait until the end of the summer, by which time I’m going to attempt to have a synthesized, basic description worked out, there are a couple of interesting links here: http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org/en/index.php?nodeID=3, http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org/en/index.php?nodeID=23. Without going into detail, there was a lot to learn in the workshop, in terms of what TO has to offer and how it’s done here, the way it’s taught and the uses it’s put to, the difficulties with it’s implementation, connections (and disconnections!) between the theory and the practice, etc. Even in my frustrations with the language barrier, I was learning. The biggest thing to come out of the week in terms of work at the CTO is the fact that I got really excited about the work again- remember and rediscovering why I came down here in the first place, which is to explore this really interesting combination of theater, politics, community building. I think I sort of lost that in the confusion of the first couple of weeks, but I’m back on track—ready to see how I can use and learn from TO. Having given myself time to adjust and settle in, I’m ready to start working in earnest- on my Fulbright application, which will involve TO and the ideas I’m getting from it, and also on writing and working though how what I’m learning this summer is going to become part of what I do in the future, both next year, and after graduation.

Other things have gone into feeling more comfortable and adjusted here. On one had, the language is getting easier. People are really surprised when they find out that I’ve only been learning/speaking Portuguese about 3 months. While it’s nice to hear “Voce fala muito bem!” (you speak very well!), it doesn’t make it any less frustrating when I don’t understand something or can’t say what I mean. My accent is much more accurate than my vocabulary is extensive. But, like I said, it’s getting a lot easier. I think that by the time I’m done here I’ll be comfortably proficient in my new language J. I’ve also had a good perspective shift, particularly in terms of maintaining a long distance relationship rather than thinking of it as a suspended relationship that I miss very much. There’s been more opportunity to be social as time goes on, too. There are 3 other people doing the exchange program at the moment- 2 of them, Paola and Stephanie, started roughly the same time I did and will be here as long as I am, and the 3^rd, Kyoung, is in his last month here. Kyoung and I get on really well; he’s a playwright and has worked in NYC, in addition to a lot of fun world travel. He and I have gone to see a couple of plays here, and explored Rio a bit, including a traditional “Juninha” or June Party. Paola, Stephanie and I have done some exploring of Santa Theresa, which is a gorgeous old neighborhood that stretches up the hill from the city center. I’ve also spent some time with my roommates, who, like I said, are really nice people. I have found myself winding up week three with the sensation of really starting to enjoy myself, and enjoy Rio.

A nasty but not permanent damper has been placed on said enjoyment; my bag was stolen on Saturday while I was on the beach, having just put my laundry in at the Laundromat a block away. My beautiful new journal, my wallet, my iPod, my house keys, and some clothes I had decided to handwash were all in the bag, which someone managed to make off with somewhere in the 20 seconds I was looking the other way. My credit card was used between the time it was stolen and I was able to call the bank to cancel it, but it’s all going to be able to be straightened out, and as for the other things…while I feel fantastically foolish in many ways, and have replayed the moment over and over, wishing I had looped an arm through the strap of the bag, there’s nothing I can do, it’s gone, and the lesson (however hard) is learned. I was pretty bent out of shape for about 24 hours, and am still, obviously, upset, but I’m moving on pretty quickly. Having lost my things is bad enough; there’s no point in also losing sleep and peace over it. I have another debit card and therefore access to money, I still have my Rio phone and so was able to call my roommate, get into the house, and have another set of keys. I wasn’t hurt. It could have been much worse. It hasn’t managed to reverse my feeling good about being here, which is good.

There was actually a nice surprise on Sunday, the day after the unfortunate beach incident. I found the apartment I’m going to move into for August, and it’s gorgeous, amazing and perfect. And inhabited by really nice people. And much less expensive than where I’m living now. I need to move, because while I really like my roommates, we live in a really expensive area of town. I’ve paid through the end of July, or I would move sooner. I moved in here because I knew for sure it was a safe area, and couldn’t check things out for myself from the States, but it’s possible to get a safe place for cheaper in other areas of Rio. The actual apartment I live in right now is far from fabulous- we’ve had our water go out for 3-5 days at a time twice since I’ve been here (I actually took my first shower in 4.5 days yesterday- talk about gross) the kitchen and bathroom are small and dirty, and there’s no common living space (which contributed to the solitary feeling in the first couple of weeks- everyone in the apt is kind of in their own rooms when home). We also live on an incredibly noisy street, and the apartment seems built so that every tenant hears all the noise the others make. Fortunately, we’re supposed to be moving all together at the end of June to somewhere nicer, and where the water doesn’t just randomly stop every weekend. But even if that place is really nice, I’m happy to be moving into this new place I found for August- saving money and getting an amazing view of the Sugarloaf.

If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! The bottom line is that I am happy to be here, and only expect my time here to keep getting better. As it does, I will try to do smaller, more palatable updates. I would really love to hear from you about how things are going, what you’re up to. If you want to shoot me an email, you can reach me at sarahejlang@gmail.com.

Much love from Rio.

P.S. I almost forgot! There’s going to be a big international TO conference here in July- the first one since 1997. That’s exciting enough in and of itself but also…I get to do the lighting work for the main performance space! I’m still not sure exactly what that’s going to mean- it’s going to have to be pretty generic, since lots of groups are going to be in the space, and since most of the performances are designed to do without really any technical support, but to whatever extent there is a “lighting designer” that’s going to be me! Sounds pretty fancy that way- I’m going to be the Lighting Designer for the 2009 International Theater of the Oppressed Conference. How do you say Source4 in Portuguese?

3 weeks and settling in

Hello all. Not a ton of time to write, so I recorded you a video. Enjoy! I'll talk to you soon.

:)

Time to go!

Leaving for the airport shortly- just showing gram the blog

Sarah's finishing packing for her departure to Rio... with coffee near by and Dad helping her set up this blog.