Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Brazil: São Paulo
São Paulo
If one spends much time in Brazil, one ends up at some point
in Sao Paolo. If one spends a little time in Brazil, it almost always includes
Sao Paolo. As New York City is not the political capital of the USA but the
cultural capital, so to is Sao Paolo not the political capital of Brazil but
the cultural capital. Sao Paolo is where it is happening, as young folks today
say.
Coals to New Castle
When I taught task‑based learning in L2 at the University of São Paulo — a place shaped by Paulo Freire’s intellectual legacy — the instructors treated TBL as if it were a brand‑new, electrifying discovery. Their enthusiasm was genuine, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit bemused. Freire had been arguing for decades that learning should emerge from real life, real problems, real dialogue. In that context, TBL shouldn’t have felt radical at all. It wasn’t that the instructors were wrong; it was just that the excitement seemed oddly disconnected from the intellectual soil they were standing on. In a Freirean institution, teaching through real‑world tasks felt less like innovation and more like rediscovering something the place already knew in its bones. And teaching TBL there felt like working on sacred ground.
Crianças (“Children”)
During my time in São Paulo, I worked with a small
grassroots initiative called Projeto de Libertação das Crianças, created to
help street kids re‑enter the school system. Every morning, children who spent
their days hawking goods on busy corners came in for a few hours of stability:
computer access, basic instruction, and a space where their street smarts were
treated as real knowledge rather than a liability. It was modest in scale but
deeply Freirean in spirit, built on the belief that education begins with the
learner’s lived reality. The name has blurred a bit over the years, but the
work remains vivid — one of the most quietly transformative projects I ever
witnessed.
Dagmar and Death Triangle
In Sao Paolo, I met one of my heroes: Dagmar. I immediately related
to her because she had a daughter with spina bifida, like I did. Sadly,
however, her daughter died at the age of six. After that, Dagmar decided to
devote her life to helping children.
She worked in Death Triangle, which earned its name. Like in
any super-sized city, wealthy folks gravitated to some areas and places like
Death Triangle beckoned to those who had nowhere else to go. Dagmar ran a
before-school and after-school shelter for children, Casa do Zezhinho (Little
Joe’s House). These children witnessed crimes, including rapes and murders, not
just on the street but also in their families. Dagmar called her educational
approach “The Pedagogy of Hope.” She taught the children additional skills, not
just book-learning, and their choir even had a chance to sing in Germany. She maintained
a clean pool for them to swim in. Of course, it was all behind a locked gate,
and when I went there, I very quickly transferred from car through gate.
Over time, Dagmar earned the respect of the tough parents of
her children, and they listened to her. She told me, “I not only had to teach them
how to parent well; I also had to teach them why not to torture their children.”
A typical punishment that parents there used
Nonetheless, she could not remain completely impervious to
the environment. One day, her father, coming to visit, was killed (killings
happened many times every day there) and left in the street. No murderer was
found; that also happened frequently. That shook Dagmar, and she left Casa do
Zezhinho from grief.
The parents, who were among some of the known criminals in
Death Triangle came to her and promised to find the murderer and kill him. They
could have made good on that promise. They had the connections. But Dagmar
waved them off—and came back to Casa do Zezhino. “Retribution is not what I
teach the children,” she said, “and I don’t want to encourage it from the
parents, either.”
My hero! And to this day, I tell time in my office by the
clock on my desk which the children made, replate with a painted house and a
boy on one side and a girl on the other, with the words, Casa do Zezhino, below
them. Some stories should never be forgotten!\
Favelas
Outside Sao Paolo—occasionally I got to travel those roads—favelas,
informal urban settlements, dotted the landscape. Usually built on the
hillsides or outer edges of Brazilian cities, houses rise in dense, improvised
layers of brick, concrete, and corrugated metal. In São Paulo, the favelas form
a kind of living patchwork around the city’s formal neighborhoods — places
where municipal services arrive slowly, if at all, and where electricity lines,
water hoses, and footpaths are often created by the residents themselves. Life
in a favela is intense and communal: children running through narrow
passageways, music drifting from open windows, small shops tucked into corners,
and families building and rebuilding their homes one paycheck at a time. It is
a world shaped by scarcity and nearly no education but sustained by astonishing
resilience, where people create order, safety, and community in spaces the city
has historically overlooked. Many times, passing by, I wished one of my
assignments would take me to one of them, but none ever appeared on Mary Poppins’
list of assignments.
Fazendas
Very different from the dense, improvised life of the favelas
on the city’s edge, a fazenda is a large rural estate, the Brazilian
counterpart to the Spanish hacienda, shaped by centuries of agricultural life.
In the interior of São Paulo, fazendas stretch across rolling land—coffee rows,
sugarcane fields, banana orchards (who knew that bananas grow upside down?), or
wide pastures—anchored by a central casa grande, the manor house that once
oversaw the entire operation. Outbuildings cluster around it: workers’
quarters, storage sheds, stables, and the remnants of older structures built in
the colonial period. Life on a fazenda moves at a slower rhythm than the city,
marked by the sounds of animals, the hum of machinery, and the long sweep of
work that begins before sunrise. These estates carry layers of history: wealth
and hardship, beauty and exploitation, tradition and change. They are self‑contained
worlds, each with its own social hierarchy, routines, and stories.
One of my Brazilian friends—shame on me for not remembering
her name these 20 years hence—invited me to her favenda for coffee (which I don’t
drink but always found a way to pretend to while in Brazil in order not to
offend). I loaded my pockets and my body with dramin (yes, the same magic pill
as the American dramamin), hopped into the passenger, and rode off to a lovely
day in paradise.
Except life on a fazenda is not always paradise. Nor is it
always safe. My friend told me a harrowing story of being robbed at gunpoint while
blissfully eating breakfast one weekend morning. Apparently, she was not alone
in such an experience. (I kept my eyes peeled while finding a way to appear
that I was drinking coffee.) That little oddity aside, we had a great day, and
the friend whose name I cannot remember was a lovely person with whom I spent a
fair amount of time in Sao Paolo.
There, though, we were joined in a popular café rather
regularly, by some other educators, mostly guys—young and full of life (well,
middle-aged, in some cases, and full of life). Their drink of choice was not
coffee in demi-tasse cups, but a solid round glass full of batida de abacaxi —
cachaça, a Brazilian spirit, blended with pineapple until it turned into
something dangerously smooth, the kind of cocktail that tasted like sunshine
and made you forget how strong it really was.
Secretary of Education
The US Embassy at one point asked me to meet with the
Secretary of Education, a nice enough man though English was not his forte. We
talked, mostly in Portuguese, and I would have to say that my Portuguese did not
outshine his English by much. However, we communicated quite well for about an
hour, and then he told me he would walk me to my next meeting, which I thought
was supposed to be a small group of educators (board of education types).
Well, in we walked—into a large auditorium. Cameras pointed
to the stage where there was a table for three. Neary 250 people populated the
seats, each with pen and pad at the ready. I was confused. Where was I supposed
to sit? With whom? (The Secretary had headed back to his office as soon as we reached
the door.) Was I really in the right place?
Fortunately, a young woman walked up to me and asked if I
would like an interpreter. Yes, of course. Maybe this would now start to make
sense.
She told me she was looking forward to my talk. It was an
important topic. My talk?? “What am I talking about?” I asked her.
She pulled out a flyer, announcing that I would be talking
to leading educators about coping with violence in public schools. Really? I am
an L2 educator. What did I know about violence in public schools? I lived in
rural Arroyo Seco, a collection of a handful of people along a river. Again,
what did I know about violence in public schools?
I took a deep breath and thought fast as she steered me to
that very visible table on the stage. No, I know nothing about violence in
public schools, but I do know how to turn troubled learners into successful learners,
and I do know that successful learners do not commit violence at school. And I
three in a plug for the criancas organization while I was at it.
I had 45 minutes at my disposal plus 15 minutes for questions.
Having an interpreter helped immensely; I only needed to say half as much and
could put together this next little bit of what I would say while she was
interpreting what I had just said (and she was stellar with some concepts that
might have been hard to interpret—my Portuguese was strong enough to know
that).
I filled those 45 minutes and asked for questions, which I
could pretty much handle on my own though having the interpreter by my side was
helpful. The questions were interesting, intriguing, and ones to which I could
respond easily—and, hopefully, helpfully. Perhaps so, because we ran over those
15 minutes and were still going 15 minutes after that.
When we finally wound down, I thanked the interpreter for
her help. She really had made it possible to survive—and enjoy—the “meeting.” I
did not have to worry about listening carefully to her to know the
interpretation was correct; it was brilliant every time I did listen. I could
just think about my own piece of it.
“Thank you,” I said. “You were wonderful.” I meant it.
“Oh,” she responded, “it is always easy to interpret when someone is as organized as you were.” Really? Well, I’m not ‘fessing up!
From the forthcoming book:
Volume 1: ABC Lands
by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver
For more posts about and from this book, click HERE.
For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.
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