| Natalie Hopkinson |
WE spoke no Portuguese. So on our second day in Salvador, one of the 12 Brazilian cities that hosted the 2014 World Cup, we haggled for an Esporte Clube Bahia soccer jersey by tapping dueling numbers into a calculator.
My 14-year-old son, Maverick, pulled 35 reals (about $10) from his backpack and handed it to the street vendor.
Then he put on the red, blue and white Bahia jersey.
Like magic, our relationship to the people around us changed instantly.
“Baéièah!” someone shouted at Maverick every block or so as we trudged along the steep and narrow streets of the old part of the city. “Baéièah!” they called out the team’s battle cry in the distinctly Bahian accent. “Baéièah!” We heard it again and again, from sidewalks or car windows, the shouter often raising a fist in triumph.
Never mind that Bahia is an often ill-fated team in a second-tier Brazilian league. (We’d watched them play the night before.)
With each greeting, my son’s chest puffed up a bit.
The author’s son practises his soccer moves
Later, as we ate grilled fish and fries at an outdoor restaurant near the gilded church of São Francisco, Maverick suddenly leaped up and pulled a soccer ball from his backpack.
I feared he would knock over some European tourist wielding a telephoto lens, but instead he spurred local Brazilians into action on this bumpy urban square. Onlookers laughed when a 40-ish man botched a trick, sending Maverick’s ball crashing into an umbrella at the next table.
A surprisingly tolerant waiter fetched it and tossed it back into play.
A little boy of about seven squared off against Maverick, exchanged a few passes and then vanished.
By the time our eight-day visit to Salvador ended, Maverick had practised several times with Bahia’s squad for 14-year-olds and made friends with lots of Brazilians his age.
He also learned to answer the “Baéièah!” call with a local comeback that’s a little too off-colour to translate here.
As a black woman who studies and writes about race and culture, I was thrilled to connect with scholars and activists in a city of three million where 80 per cent of residents are of African descent. Although its economy has stumbled recently, Brazil’s explosive economic growth (its economy is larger than Canada’s) has long been a source of pride for those of us with roots in the developing world.
So this trip, taken the summer before Maverick headed to high school, gave us a rare opportunity to explore things we are both passionate about and expand our circle of relationships together.
Taking your teenager to a country where you don’t speak the language is not the most relaxing vacation.
But even though a slight majority of everyday Salvadorans we met didn’t speak English, most could communicate in Spanish, and we got by just fine using my fading skills in that language. And we made one smart decision right away: We chose to stay at the Pestana Convento do Carmo hotel, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The price ($150 a night) shocked the local people we met, but it was worth it.
Many on the hotel staff spoke English, and the setting – a converted 16th-century monastery – was built for peace and contemplation. I felt safe allowing my son to wander through the old monastery, with its expansive hallways, high ceilings, wading pool and window nooks built for meditating over lush gardens.
But what was outside the hotel’s massive stone walls was just as enticing: the ancient neighbourhood of Pelourinho, one of the oldest parts of Salvador, where the streets of blackened stone were bustling with street dancers and drummers, vendors selling local streetscape paintings, restaurants, bars and shops.
It was in those streets that I got my introduction to Bahia’s unique history of slavery, migration and continuing racial struggle.
On the first of the three days Maverick trained with the Bahia youth soccer squad, we hopped in the car with Kleber Batista, the DC-based former pro soccer player who made our “futebol” connections.
As he skillfully barreled a tiny sedan through the narrow colonial roads, he told us stories of the slaves who laid the stone streets and built the grand neo-Gothic Catholic churches by hand.
Throughout Pelourinho we saw black women dolled up in African head wraps and colonial hoop skirts – a blend of traditional European and West African dress that is their everyday wear.
We saw a similar dress on the women representing the West African Yoruba deities, “orishas,” at a Condomblé ceremony at a Salvador temple.
Street scene in Salvador, Brazil
Once banned by Brazilian authorities, the Yoruba-derived religion now boasts some 1,100 churches in Salvador.
Bodysurfing on the impossibly blue waves with his new friends, my 14-year-old son – who, at six-foot-one, looked a lot like the men who had been frisked – was blissfully oblivious to the darker currents running through the city.
He certainly had no problems fitting in at soccer.
When Batista first arranged for him to suit up with Esporte Clube Bahia’s youth team, I had expected his teammates to be resentful of this American kid, who is soft by Brazil’s highly physical standards of play.
But it was just the opposite.
The one English-speaking kid on the team occasionally translated.
After the first day of practise, they crowded around Maverick, eager to exchange Snapchat and Instagram accounts.
Many of the kids he met face a tough future.
Roughly 70 per cent of the kids that Maverick practiced with on the Bahia team would drop out of high school to work to support their families, Coach Laelson Lopes told us.
Another new friend of Maverick’s, 16-year-old Kauan Sacramento, the son of the vice mayor, played for Esporte Clube Vitória, Bahia’s bitter archrival.
But Kauan Sacramento had to stop playing soccer because it interfered with his studies.
At least he was able to focus on school without having to work to support his family – a luxury that many of his peers don’t have.
A very small number of Maverick’s new friends will make it to the Itaipava Arena Fonte Nova stadium, where six World Cup matches were played in 2014.
Across the stadium, there is a man-made lake ringed with illuminated statues representing the orishas. Both Bahia and Vitória have stadiums that draw tens of thousands of fans twice a week.
During games, competing drum sections narrate the action with maximum drama and a kind of military flair. The games are so intense that armed police escort referees off the field.
A weekday victory means amped-up fans create an instant street party around the stadiums. In Brazil, they don’t need much of an excuse to party.
Like the beaches, the crowds at the soccer stadium impressed me with their racial integration. Sacramento, the vice mayor, agreed that soccer is a unifying force.
But she noted that political and economic empowerment for Salvador’s majority black population is moving at a painfully slow pace.
She, for example, is only the second black person to hold a government office as high as hers in the history of Salvador.
She hopes to see more black people attending college and running for office. “Some problems we need to solve ourselves,” she said.
On our last day in Salvador, Sacramento had a gift for Maverick.
She had seen him wearing his blue-and-red Bahia jersey like a second skin.
When he went back to Washington, she wanted him to represent Salvador the right way.
She handed him a brand new red-and-black jersey for her favourite team: the rival Vitória Clube.
“VC!” she chanted, shaking a powerful fist.
Maverick, always polite, said, “Thank you” – and resisted the urge to shout back, “Baéièah!” – Text & Photos by The Washington Post
The post A passion for soccer helps unite one of the world’s most diverse countries appeared first on Borneo Bulletin Online.