4th of July’s are usually pretty standard events. One time I was on a plane for the 4th, but aside from that one instance, every other time has been pretty much a day devoted to celebrating the American dream. My typical 4th of July has usually involved all, or some combination of sunburns, hamburgers, baseball, fireworks, friends, family, potato salad, cheap beer and a day off work. Hell, last year, my sister somehow got me into the State Department party where I taste-tested apple pie with foreign emissaries and watched the fireworks over the monuments in Downtown DC with former President Bill Clinton and at the time, current Secretary of State Hilary Clinton just a few feet away. It was pretty freakin’ American if you ask me. But then there was this year, which, as a result of my geographic location among other things, strayed from the norm and turned out to be what was probably my most un-American 4th of July ever. There was no beach, and there were no fireworks. No national anthem, no BBQ, and no sweltering heat. I think the closest baseball game was something like 10,000 miles away. Oddly enough, there were still Presidents though.
Today, I had my first “official” meeting with a variety of representatives from the communities that I will be assisting with the Bridge Project. The meeting took place in a village called Bandari, the closet village to the potential bridge site, under a big Alpendra (sort of like an open-air gazebo, but with a roof made of capin and an architecture style that was far from Victorian). Nearly 50 villagers sat in the shanty’s shade on wooden benches, bamboo stools, rope beds, straw mats and piles of dirt. Among the attendees were village Presidents, Kings, Chiefs and other elders. They all sat in a big circle on one end of the alpendra, and behind them, occupying random ground-space inside and out of the shoddy structure were intrigued farmers, unoccupied villagers, and curious children. All of them had come to learn more about the project, and I, using my shitty Portuguese (which most of them don’t even speak anyway), would have to be the one to explain it to them.
I had previously visited Bandari a few weeks before to start the ball rolling on a feasibility study, trying to answer the question of whether this was something they actually needed. More importantly though, I was out to find out if this was something they actually wanted as well. I’d done a fair amount of research inspecting the river, looking at current crossings, talking to villagers and recognizing how dependent they were on the river, so I had a pretty good feeling I had already answered both questions. After the meeting today though, both answers were definitive “Yes’s.”
The meeting itself went pretty smoothly. Like I said, people outside of the city don’t really know all that much Portuguese, but I was lucky enough to have my two counter-parts (Alan, the missionary and Armindo, my former-Portuguese tutor turned English student) with me to help translate all the technical mumbo-jumbo into the local language (Macua, and both of them speak it perfectly). The night before the meeting, I produced a nice little PowerPoint presentation on my computer full of pictures to help illustrate some of the stuff I had planned to talk about. That aspect couldn’t have gone better. The pictures needed no translation as the grandiose images of completed bridges spoke for themselves, inspiring thoughts in the heads of each attendee of crossing a similar bridge that they could call their own. To watch their reactions to these pictures was truly magnificent.
The whole thing ended up going really well, but in the reality of things, this was only really a small step in the right direction. I still have a ways to go, and many, many more hurdles (most of which will be much, much bigger) to overcome. My cousin Jay once gave me some advice about tackling big projects, a mentality I’ve been trying to apply to this one as well. “How do you eat an elephant?” he asked. As I pondered the question, trying to come up with a witty response, he, with an uplifting smile and his renowned sense of humor, beat me to it. “One bite at a time.”
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