The Sertão

Natal is on the coast. Beautiful beaches in Brazil, wow. Then we drove east through the transitional land between the coast and the desert—this is where all the crops and trees are grown, sugar cane and corn and such. Then that gave way to the Sertão, which is mainly sagebrush. But it isn’t flat, and the road is windy. It got dark early, so we drove quite a ways on small hilly windy roads, very fast. Some of the roads looked like we were turning into driveways— “take a left at the sagebrush.” Others were under construction so branches were periodically placed across one side. Driving 100kph on a 1-lane dark hilly windy road…. By the way, if you're in a developing country and you see a branch or tree in the road, watch out. It's not an accident. But on the whole, the roads were very good, much better and less crowded than in Mozambique.

When we finally arrived, I thought it was near 10pm but it was only 7:30pm.

A lot here reminds me of Mozambique. The buildings and the towns look very similar, the landscape from the coast through the transition region was similar, and our house is similar to our house in Maputo, with spacious rooms and open windows and tile in the rooms. A lot of the products are familiar to me too, the Lux soap and the Parmalat boxed milk and the Flora tubs of butter, which is nice.

The Sertão is the poorest region in Brazil, and some have said in the whole of Latin America. It gets rain for only 3 or 4 months a year. If you have a cistern, that lasts another 8 months. If you don’t…. So there is no farming, except for a bit of corn and beans.

In my culture textbook, I read that in Northeast Brazil they don’t even really recognize a baby as alive until it shows it has a chance of survival:“Infants who are small and weak, who do not nurse vigorously, and who are frequently ill are believed to “want to die” and to become angels who fly up to heaven. There is little ceremony at their burial, their graves are unmarked, and the mother does not show much grief. (If a mother weeps, her tears dampen the wings of the little angel, so he or she cannot fly to heaven.) Nancy Sheper-Hughes, who worked among these women, sees the mothers’ reaction as a response to their desperate circumstances: women cannot afford to invest financially and emotionally in babies who probably will not live." (Peoples and Bailey, 2003)

Patos is the biggest city around, and has 100,000 people compared to the villages we passed through that had around 10,000 people. The main church in Patos is quite a large and nice building. It is now about to be incorporated officially into the Independent Presbyterian Church of Brazil, instead of being just a mission church, and they'll elect their first elders and deacons. So it's quite an exciting step, and I'll be here for the ceremony in December.