A soggy Santos soccer game

Rain hits hard and without warning in this city. A sunny day can quickly shift to ominous clouds of lightning in a matter of minutes. As I discovered yesterday afternoon, being unprepared for such transformations will get the contents of your pockets all soggy.

I took the bus with a friend to Morumbi, a part of town I have never visited by bus, to see Santos take on Bragantino in the semifinals of Campeonato Paulista - that's soccer, folks. Well, as sometimes happens in huge cities with confusing roads, the bus turned out not to go the way we wanted to go, so we had to get off and take another bus back to an earlier stop and figure out how to get to this game. And, of course, the sky is getting darker all the while.

At one point, I foresaw the future. It depicted my friend and I huddled under a bus stop in the pouring rain in an unfamiliar part of São Paulo. Five minutes later, the future had arrived. Luckily, we hailed a cab after running through the rain for a good minute or two and were able to make the game before the opening kickoff. (I guess it's more of a tapoff in soccer, but I just like the idea of opening kickoffs.)

The rain was really strong at the start of the game. I had purchased a poncho before entering the stadium even though I was already soaked. Our seats happened to be on the second-level of the stadium under an awning, but the poncho still came in handy to keep me from becoming hypothermic.

The first half of the match was not pretty as the ball slowed in a puddle of water the minute it hit the turf. It wasn't much different then playing soccer with a checkered rock. One quirky thing about Morumbi's stadium is that the rain water is drained into the stadium through little pipes. Small streams of water flowed from above all around the stadium for the first half until the rain subsided. If a soccer stadium could somehow be built among the Iguaçu Falls, it would feel something like that.

Things picked up a bit in the second half, and the Santos fans really got into it as a win or tie would propel their team to the championship game. In my opinion, Santos got outplayed in the second half, but managed to hold on for a 0-0 tie. I don't even want to think about how the thousands of Santos-faithful would have reacted had their team lost. There is nothing worse than a mass of disappointed, angry soccer fans. Nothing.

I had a couple of notable experiences last week that deserve mentioning. Saturday, I visited a fazenda of the Landless Workers Movement, known here as Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST. The Landless Workers Movement is the largest social movement in Latin America with well over a million members.

The main objective of MST is land reform in a country were less than 2% of the population owns nearly half of all the fertile land. The movement started in the mid-80s and has grown tremendously over the last 30 years. The way MST works is the group first identifies a piece of land that is not being used, then they occupy it, then they gain the property rights to the land. This chain of events has been upheld in the courts in many instances due to Article 5 in Brazil's constitution which states that land which remains unproductive should be used for a "larger social function." (wikipedia)

The farm that I visited was located about an hour north of São Paulo in a town called Sumaré. The movement had seized the property over 20 years ago and the fields seemed maintained and orderly. We took a stroll through the banana fields and got a peak inside one of the houses on the property. We were led by one of the leaders and original founders of the farm whose beliefs in the success of MST were tied closely to his beliefs in Christianity. The house that we viewed had running water, electricity, hard-tile floors. We were served lunch in a school hall-like building where chickens were kept in the back and a few kids played soccer out front on a sandy field. It seemed like a productive, peaceful community. A thousand times safer than a favela where many of the people involved in MST would probably end up if not for the movement.

Obviously, what this group does is controversial and considered criminal by some, but I find it hard to condemn the people that I encountered last weekend for wanting to have a better, simple life in a country where everything belongs to the few at the expense of the many. Our guide claimed that MST is not a political movement, but there has been evidence that contradicts that belief. Still, I think extreme political beliefs are oftentimes the product of extreme circumstances. How else are these people supposed to make their livelihood?

The second notable experience I had last week was shocking, unpleasant and thankfully over before I could fully process it. I was stopped by a policeman with a drawn weapon as I was making the short walk from my house to the metro around nine o'clock at night. The policeman ordered me to put my hands behind my head and gave me a quick pat down while asking me where I lived and where I was from. Since I was obviously foreign he let me go, but the situation was certainly confusing and frightening.

I had obviously walked into a developing situation. I had passed a suspicious figure hiding behind a tree not far from where I was stopped by the police, so being stopped by the cops wasn't entirely unfounded. The Policia Federal have a reputation for shooting first and asking questions later. It's not much better than being stopped by a criminal. I guess in some way, my foreignness became an advantage for me in that situation.

On a lighter note, I cannot believe that the month of May is just around the corner. My 21st birthday will be next month, and my family has offered to put on a churrasca for the occassion. That means, good food, live music, lots of friends and I'm sure a beer or two will work its way between those three.