Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [122]
“I am not a foreigner here!” Isme said in English, but using the Portuguese word for foreigner. “You are, but I am not!”
“The word ‘foreigner’ is not insulting,” I said. I looked at Rita and Fio. “Excuse me,” I said to them, “I have to explain this in English.” They gave me bemused smiles and nodded. “The word ‘foreigner’ is not an insult,” I said again, “it just means you’re not from here. ‘Gringa’ also means outsider, specifically from a First World country, and sometimes it is an insult. But ‘foreigner’ has no such connotation at all.”
“I am not a foreigner! We’re just like people from here, we’re all from Africa.”
“A mix,” I said. “Your ancestry is clearly mixed. As with many people here. But you are not Brazilian. That is the difference, you and me, we are both United States Americans.”
Isme looked at me. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. No one here sees me as a foreigner. Rita and Phil, to them I’m just the same. I have an intuitive understanding of Brazilians that you will never have!” She turned to her friends. “Let’s go. We can come back when she’s not here.”
They walked into the street and I slumped at the table. Fio came and put his arm around my shoulder.
“What was that all about?” he asked. “They didn’t like you.”
“No,” I said, “no, they didn’t.” I sighed and told them the conversation. “I was stupid,” I said. “I guess I just got angry. I got mad when I saw you both so upset, but I should have kept my mouth shut. They’re young, they don’t know any better.”
“They’re old enough,” Rita said. “Other local nonprofits here are having the same problem we are. We’re supposed to be international training spots for these kids. The people running these programs also don’t understand, or don’t care, that it takes our time when we should be running our programs. And no one has yet offered us any money.”
“We should set standards,” Fio said. “I was just startled when they came in before; I wasn’t expecting them. Things have been confused because Jamin came in sick this morning and Jessica’s neighbor got shot last night—she talk with you yet about that, Rita?” Rita nodded. “There was just too much going on.”
Rita smiled. “You’re just not very fierce, Fio.”
“No,” he said. “But I will be.” He pretended to growl. “You give me the script, and I’ll just become Muhammad Ali.” He flexed his nonexistent arm muscles. Rita and I laughed.
“Let’s go for lunch,” Rita said. “We can devise some rules.”
I wanted to do more than that. International relations, particularly when mixed with race and economics, get complicated. I looked at these well-meaning young people and wished we could somehow incorporate them into some kind of program with Bahia Street, one that would not infringe upon the program itself. One that would start with the premise that the person getting something out of this overseas experience was almost always the foreigner not the local people, to create some kind of program that would teach the infrastructures of equality, building upon what Rita and I had learned through Bahia Street. A program that would help Americans understand that they were not superior to others on the planet, that our ways of doing things were not inherently the correct ones, that we were all in this soup swimming together. These young people wanted to learn about inequality and social justice; they just needed someone to show them some realities outside what their lives had so far led them to believe. I had no idea how to set up such a program. Perhaps someday, I thought.
Although I didn’t know how to set up the program I envisioned, Rita and I had decided to bring a small group of visitors, in a controlled setting, to see Bahia Street’s work in Salvador. We would also take these visitors to see parts of Bahia they otherwise would not be able to visit—from shantytowns, so they could have a taste of the kinds of poverty in Bahia, to beautiful villages and beaches they would otherwise never find. The