Gang Leader for a Day

Research for my Masters thesis took me to Brazil. I wasn’t particularly brave about it. Two days before the trip a friend and I replaced the white laces on my brand new running shoes with some old black ones, cunningly, we figured, reducing the risk that I’d get mugged for my shoes (yes, I’m serious, this actually happened). When I first got to Porto Alegre I became a sort of inverse vampire, desperately scampering back to my hotel the moment things got dusky – so certain was I that the streets would become filled with muggers the moment the sun sank behind the horizon. When I got to Rio – fed for months on tales of the dangers of the city – I practically commando rolled across the tarmac at the domestic airport.

In other words, I was nothing like Sudhir Venkatesh, sociologist and author of Gang Leader for a Day. He spent years researching the housing complexes of Chicago, starting off his project by being detained at gun point.

I’ve written a review of Venkatesh’s book, which is up at Scoop Review of Books.

It’s also over the fold.

Corruption!

I work in international development. Corruption is something development types take seriously – it gets in the way of markets and stops governments from doing good things like providing health care or building schools.  In general, it’s a bad thing. So bad in fact that, as an idealistic younger man, I travelled to Brazil to study something called the Orcamento Participativo, a system of municipal governance which, among other successes to its name, was credited with reducing corruption in the cities where it ran.

Unlike corruption, tipping, on the other hand, isn’t something development types think so much about. It doesn’t lead to war, or stagnation, or disease. It’s not without its challenges though. Especially as no two countries have exactly the same approach to it. In New Zealand you don’t have to tip at restaurants and you’d be thought of as positively odd if you tried to tip anywhere else. In New York, on the other hand, not only do you need to tip restaurant staff even if the service is poor, but you also need to tip bar tenders and hairdressers. In other countries like England and Spain the norms are different again.

Having muddled my way around the globe’s tipping norms, by the time I got to Brazil for my masters research I figured I’d stop guessing and simply ask. Sure, there was the risk that the porter, or waiter or whoever, might say yes even when a tip wasn’t necessary but I figured they were poorly paid service workers in a third world country. If I ended up giving them a few extra dollars when it wasn’t really necessary, what was the harm.

The only real problem I had was that I didn’t actually know the Portuguese word for ‘tip’. Not such a big problem though, I decided I’d just use the Spanish word – propina – instead. Often-enough Spanish and Portuguese words are interchangeable. And in the South of Brazil, where I was, the local vernacular had a stronger than usual Spanish influence.

And so it was that I spent my first few days dealing with my tip uncertainty in a straight-up manner. I asked the nice old guy who carried my bags at the hotel if it was “normal dar uma propina” for his services. He looked at me a little funny – probably struggling with my accent or grammar – but took the change I gave him. The same thing happened with the waitress at the vegetarian restaurant, the guy at the café and the woman at the hairdressers. (Although, she started with a puzzled ‘no’ before changing her answer to ‘yes’). I was a bit suspicious, no one ever really turned my offer of a tip down, but in general the process seemed to be working. I was being straight up, and practicing my Portuguese to boot. Something that, from the strange looks I was receiving, I really did need to work on.

Despite all this, when the chance arose, I did take the opportunity to get independent verification of local tipping norms, and of my use of the word ‘propina’. My chance for this came through Yamil, a friend of a friend, who I went and stayed with in Gramado. He spoke perfect English, had travelled a lot, and aided whenever he could during my stay in Brazil.

And so, one afternoon, I explained to him what I’d been doing and asked whether ‘propina’ was indeed the right word.

His reply started with a laugh.

“No in Portuguese the word is Gorgetta. And here in the south of Brazil the word ‘propina’ means something like a bribe.”

So there I was – student of anti-corruption measures, spending my first few days in Brazil wandering about, trying desperately to bribe my way through its service industry. No wonder they kept giving me strange looks.

Beautiful Horizons

There’s something to be said for English. It may not sound like an extended poem like Spanish, or have the sweet-softened edges of French, but it’s a magpie’s nest full of words, either beautiful or, at the very least, fun. Luminous, wander, voyage, shade. Catapult. Caterwauling. Cacophony. Shout.

If there’s one area that does let us down it’s place names. Compare Johnsonville, Greytown and Lower Hutt to Rio de Janeiro (January’s River), Porto Alegre (Happy Port) and Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizon).

A few years ago I spent 3 weeks in Belo Horizonte. I arrived groggy and folded from a 22 hour bus ride to discover myself in the middle of a metropolis home to a population greater than New Zealand’s. It was quite some time before I found the horizon. To do that I had to take us bus up into what my friends called favelas dos ricos – the favelas of the rich.

Once upon a time only the poor in Brazilian cities lived on the hillsides, the more affluent preferring the services and convenience of the flat. And so the word favela is associated by most Brazilians not only with slums but more specifically with slums on hills. You can still find plenty of these – perched above Rio, for example, are dangerous, violent ghettos with amazing ocean views. In Belo Horizonte though, in recent years the wealthy too have taken to the slopes. So some of the hillside suburbs are now covered in mansions – favelas for the rich.

The bus deposited me amongst big bold houses crouched behind fences. I picked a promising looking street, one which continued up, and began to walk. At first I wove between houses, thankful for the fences, protecting me from guard dog after guard dog, teeth bared between the bars. But, as I climbed the sections became larger until they stopped. The road now cut between trees on one side and a wall on the other – the edge of a military barracks, I guessed.

I kept going, puffing – conscious and anxious of the fact I was alone. Looking back at the beginnings of the view I watched a helicopter hover above a mansion’s helipad. If you’re really rich in Brazil you don’t commute on the dangerous, congested roads, you fly. In Sao Paulo, apparently, at rush hour the skies are filled by the wealthy avoiding the city they live within.

The end of the road, when I got there, was familiar in a way – two teenagers making out in their car, a dilapidated park, a light coating of rubbish – and Brazilian too: a man in a brown leather jacket holding a machete was selling soft drinks and coconuts. The machete was for the coconuts, of course, and no doubt it was just worry working my imagination, but something about the way he held that knife made me wonder what might happen if I declined to purchase something. Thirsty all of a sudden I bought a coconut when he asked, noting with some satisfaction that a car load of Brazilians who arrived shortly after me did exactly the same.

Sipping through a straw I wandered off and found my horizon already being swallowed by dusk and smog. Striving, like rainforest trees in search of the light, the buildings of the city below pressed up together in haphazard competition. Beyond them the suburbs stretched (the one I was staying in was so large that a taxi driver the night before had had to drive round for half an hour asking for directions to the address I’d given him). And then finally, after all that, the buildings gave way to the roll of hills and the undulating line that separated the darkening land from the orange of the sky.

Belo Horizonte earned its name, although in the interests of fairness I should disclose that Belo Horizonte itself is situated within a state called Minas Gerais (General Mines). Not all Brazilian place names are poetic.

Belo Horizonte from Favela dos Ricos

View from the window of the ambassador’s residence in Brasilia