When I talk about Brazil

I’m currently very close to failing one of my yearly goals, which is to publish a post per week on this blog. There are fifty minutes left on the week and I’m sat here determined not to fail.

I failed my commitment to publish on Wednesdays at 9am, which I kept for sixteen weeks, and I’d rather not fail the goal right now.

There will always be excuses, but mine right now is that I went to Rio to be a guide to a friend who flew in from England, and on the days leading up to it I made sure to work a little harder to ensure I could go on the trip without needing to take my laptop. Unfortunately I didn’t have a post scheduled this time.

The good thing about this short trip though is that it brought a lot of reflections that will likely serve as seeds for my writing.

One of these has led to this post.

During the time we spent together in Rio, both my friend and his girlfriend asked me a ton of questions, and I also proactively told them every little fun or interesting fact I could think of.

Their questions were often along the lines of “How’s X in Brazil”, and my comments preceded with “In Brazil…”

But the thing is — that’s kind of misleading.

Last year I went on a roadtrip to Chapada dos Veadeiros, a national park in a neighboring state. When I came back, I woke up the morning after, looked up at the map that was the cover image of this post, and realized that in the two days we’d spent driving on our way back (spending around 10h on the road each day), we’d only covered a teeny tiny section of this massive country.

So that’s why it’s hard to talk about Brazil.

The Mercator projection we use for our maps of the world may fool us, but in reality every country in Europe fits inside of Brazil (if you ignore the portion of Russia in Europe).

For the most part, we do all speak the same language (although there are many indigenous languages in Brazil), but within Brazil there are so many different cultures, histories, ecosystems, people, landscapes, and so on, that it’s impossible to speak for everyone.

I try to be mindful of this and often mention about how I mostly speak for my state, or my city even.

But even that is perhaps generalizing too much.

While socioeconomic status affects lifestyle everywhere in the world, income inequality in Brazil is one of the worst in the world1, and it makes it so that people at different spots on the income spectrum have wildly different lives.

So realistically, in a lot of issues, I speak for a very small portion of my country. Perhaps my neighborhood, if even that.

Now, I have of course traveled, studied, and interacted with a lot of other Brazilians, and thus can make certain comments that are applicable more broadly. I also do believe that there are indeed cultural traits that are mostly present across the country, and can speak about those too.

But I just wanted to have this little disclaimer ready, and will probably start sending it to international friends that ask me questions about Brazil.

So when I talk about Brazil, I certainly have a lot to teach, but do take my answers with a pinch of salt.

And on my end, I’ll keep the map up in my room as a reminder that I myself still have a lot to learn about my own country.

Which, I have to say, is quite an exciting prospect.