2009 October

Day of Saints Cosme and Damião

October 20, 2009 | Nancy Bacon

Margaret recently called Rita to plan for her upcoming trip to Bahia. She reached Rita on her cell phone at the Teatro Velho (Old Theater) with the roar of children in the background. As a part of the Day of Children (which is actually on October 12th), the whole student body was spending the week at the theater taking part in an arts program focused on spring and children.  Bahia is celebrating the start of spring now.

Rita also reminded us that they had just celebrated the Day of Saints Cosme and Damião, twin saints who represent prosperity in Salvador. It is the custom that people provide food to the poor on this day. The Bahia Street Center prepares a huge feast and opens up the Center to the whole community. It is believed that providing food ensures prosperity to the future– you increase your own luck for the future if you give away food. Rita takes this opportunity to thank the community for its enduring support. She invited the children from a neighborhood project, Sinal Fechado (“Red Light,” representing the traffic lights at which many children work), to come for a meal.  In fact, Bahia Street receives support from a donor to help Sinal Fechado throughout the year in order to extend Bahia Street’s infrastructure beyond our Center to other places of need within the community in which the Center is located.  Below are some pictures of the Bahia Street girls preparing the ocra for the main dish of this festival, Caruru, and the Sinal Fechado children eating the meal. Caruru is food that is eaten following certain rituals, the main one being that the kids get to eat first! It is actually quite delicious… a supporter of ours put the recipe on their webpage.

Peace Vigil, Night Streets

October 20, 2009 | Margaret Willson

I encountered my identity Tuesday night. It shifts and shadows itself with circumstance and space.

Tuesday night I walked from my Central Area home to the peace vigil at the Federal Building. I left about 9:30 PM, carrying my pillow and foam pad for sitting. I had dressed in my warmest clothes.

Halfway down Jackson Street, I met two men, both also dressed warmly. One carried a bag over his shoulder.

”That’s great,” the taller one said, “you’ve got it down. Even a pillow.”

“Yeah,” said the other, a shorter, stockier man. “I wish I had a pad like that, it looks great.”

“It’s my backpacking gear,” I said. “Are you spending the entire night?’

“Yeah, I got some warm gear too,” the stockier one said, slapping his bag, “but it sure is heavy.”

“That’s a lot for just one night,” I said.

“One night? This is for three.”

“But this is the last night,” I said.

“Last night? What?’ The two looked startled and nervous.

Then we all looked at each other. “I think we’re going different places. You going to the First Avenue Service Center?”

“No,” I said, “I’m going to the vigil.”

“Oh, that’s those protester guys.” the taller fellow explained to his friend.

“What’s the First Avenue Service Center?” I asked.

The two proceeded to tell me that it was where one waits for a job call, done every morning at four-thirty. The stockier fellow said he had been working as a gardener for three years, but was homeless because he couldn’t afford to pay rent in Seattle. He’d lived in Bremerton for a couple of years and commuted, but then the ferries got too expensive, so he came to Seattle. He was sleeping on the streets and the Service Center until he could save up enough money to pay the first and last month’s rent required to get an apartment.

By the end of two blocks, we discovered we had friends in common.

“Enjoy your vigil!” the stocky fellow shouted as we parted at the bus stop.

“And stay warm,” I replied.

“Nice guys,” I thought as I continued on my way.

I wondered if we would have spoken if they had not initially believed that I, like them, was homeless, if instead, we would have exchanged guarded glances and kept barriers firmly in place.

Just then, I traversed Fourth Street. Crossing in the crosswalk with the light, I was nearly mowed down by a police car. He had apparently been waiting at the light, but had now put on his lights and was running the red light, bearing directly toward me at top speed. With my bad eyesight and because he was using no siren, I had not perceived him until nearly too late.

I leapt to the curb, heart pounding, completely unnerved. The police car had continued to aim itself directly at me, unswerving, as though the driver actually meant to hit me. As I stood on the curb, it sped out of sight.

As I recovered and began to walk again, I wondered at the police person’s motive. I had never encountered this kind of behavior before. Had he played his game of chicken because he thought I was a homeless person or because he thought I was a protester on my way to a peace vigil? Either way, the behavior was extremely disturbing.

“Hey there.” An older man with a grizzled, long beard greeted me as he prepared his bedroll in a doorway.

“He definitely thinks I’m homeless,” I thought. I smiled and nodded at him.

As I approached the vigil, the sense of peace was perceptible. Twenty or so bundled figures sat before candles in silence to one side of the Federal Building Plaza. A few apparently homeless people also inhabited the Plaza space, one of them muttering to himself.

One meditator quietly asked another if she would walk with her to the restrooms down by the ferry docks. Her voice carried a mixture of determination and fear. The other meditators sat, bundled in their blankets, most of whom had probably never spent a night in downtown Seattle before, certainly not outside. Then I watched the homeless people who had assuredly known many nights much the same as this one. I wondered how obvious it was to which group I belonged.

I laid out my pad and pillow, sat down. The sounds I heard were the wind, cars and the soft murmurs of the homeless man somewhere behind me, talking to his invisible friend.

Bahia Street News

October 5, 2009 | Bahia Street

Margaret Willson has just published news about her trip to Bahia and the girls at the Bahia Street Center in the Bahia Street blog.

Circles of Communication

October 5, 2009 | Margaret Willson

A friend of mine once did a research paper showing how people move through conversations in circles, repeating themes, coming back again and again to the same subjects, the same patterns of speech. Friendships, he found, are built upon connecting speech circles that over time move in increasingly well-oiled rhythms.

These circles of communication revolve on an axis of ritualized phrases, patterns of call and response that reaffirm our position as a member of a community. They bring a stability we take for granted; it is only when the cadence of communication breaks that we notice, when we make a statement to someone for which we expect a certain response and we don’t get it. Much miscommunication between people of differing societies is perhaps related to differing speech rhythms that each takes for granted and then misunderstands.

Some years ago in London, a Brazilian boyfriend brought me a cup of tea while I was at home writing one day. He did this often for me. I looked up from my papers and smiled. “Thank you,” I said.

He turned quickly, said nothing.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

He looked at the opposite wall. “Why do you always push me away?”

“What?”

“You are so formal with me. I am your boyfriend. Why do you treat me like a stranger?”

“What?”

“Never mind.” He walked to the door.

“Wait a minute. Do you mean you are upset because I thanked you?”

Yes, he was. A verbal thanks, he said in our discussion that eventually followed, is what you do with strangers or acquaintances; not with your family, not with lovers. With those who are close to you, you are instead conscious of the balance that occurs when one person looks to the needs of another. Doing things for another person is how you show your love.

“Do you thank your lover for kissing you?” he asked. Thanking someone verbally for acts of love undermines them he said, gives them less meaning; one doesn’t say thank you, one returns love. To say thank you is to indicate that you want to finish the continuum between yourself and the other person: thank you is a form of release, and release is not what a lover wants.

I did not fully understand the distinction he was making at the time, but it set me thinking about US rituals of courtesy. In US society “thank you” is the appropriate response for everything from passing the salt to saving a person’s life. “Please” and “thank you” are fundamentals of social behavior. When a child asks for anything, the standard adult response is, “What do you say?” Then when the child gets what she wants, the adult says, “Now what do you say?” The training practices are as ritualized as the response.

I asked my English friend Jeremy for his opinion on thank you. As a member of the British upper class, I figured he would understand British etiquette and the meanings behind it.

“You do rather overuse your thank you,” he said. “Overused, thank you loses its energy, takes a superficial quality.  Something endemic of many parts of American speech I should say. Don’t you agree?” Thank you, according to Jeremy, is used when someone has done something for which you are truly grateful.

The other day in Seattle, a bus driver let me off at a downtown stop. “Thank you,” I said as I descended the stair.

“No problem,” he said.

As I walked down the street I realized I was smiling, made comfortable through rituals of courtesy that both the bus driver and I understood.

Then, later that day, I booked a reservation on the train.

“Thank you,” a computerized voice said.

I sat at my desk and thought about why a company would program its computer to say thank you to unknown customers. Through using this speech pattern, the company was creating an anthropomorphized machine that in manufactured tones of friendliness gave me constructed courtesy, a subtle and powerful manipulation makes the caller respond with an automatic positive emotion. Had I never known people different from myself and had the meanings behind speech patterns brought to my attention, I might never have noticed.