Text by Bethanie Walder

In Brazil, time is not money…

After two days of filling out paperwork, running in circles, re-filling out paperwork, running in circles again, revisiting the federal police office four times, the bank twice, and the Brazilian IRS once, we appear to finally have all the required numbers, documents, and registrations to live in Brazil as foreigners.  We won’t get permanent ID cards for about 45 days, and it will still take a week before our new bank account will be activated, (which means that Marcel can then get paid) but theoretically anyway, it will be activated!

Image below: Marcel does not respond well to bureaucracy in Brazil :)

This is the first time Katia has had to navigate the registration system for visiting professors (fortunately she reacts more calmly than Marcel!). We feel terrible she’s spent so much time with us doing this. She feels terrible because she didn’t know the entire process before hand, and she ends up thanking us for helping her learn to navigate the system. When she picked us up for the second day of the registration merry-go-round she reminded us that this is just how it is in Brazil. Hopefully we’re mostly done with bureaucracy for a while.

In the process, we learned the following:

1. It’s not safe to sit in a parked car on a street in Piracicaba. We were told to arrive at the police dept. at 6:00 am to get in line (outside) so we could be assured we would be seen that day. But it’s still dark at 6:00 am, so Katia’s husband made her promise that we wouldn’t wait in the car outside the police department for our very early morning arrival. We ended up driving around a bit (since there were only 3 people waiting in line at 6:00), until it was light enough to join the line.
2. While chatting as we waited more than 3 hours to be seen by the police, we learned that Brazil has the deadliest form of tick-borne spotted fever in the world. If undiagnosed, it can kill you within 48 hours after the symptoms appear. I did some reading when we got home and apparently it’s the same spotted fever as we have in North America, but it’s much more virulent and lethal. Katia says it kills nearly 80% of those infected due to misdiagnosis (though if you are correctly diagnosed it can be relatively easily treated, it’s just that time is of the essence). Capybara are the main host, and the area we live in has lots of capybara, so we have to take any tick bites very, very seriously. In addition, the initial symptoms are similar to those of dengue fever, which is another reason it is often misdiagnosed, and then fatally mistreated. Egads.
3. While spending nearly 2 hours at the bank and in between signing forms and filling out paperwork, Katia told us that the governor of Sao Paulo is seriously considering selling off 1/3 of the land (~1,000 hectares) of the ESALQ Piracicaba campus of USP, including the experimental forest and agricultural lands that Katia’s husband Sylvio is currently overseeing. The governor wants to sell them to industry to secure more votes for the October election. ESALQ is the largest USP campus and the lands in question also provide habitat for puma, maned wolf and other wildlife. It will have a profound impact on the long-term research going on there, and an associated gene bank. Sylvio and his colleagues have been working frantically to change the governor’s mind, but to no avail so far. We are so disturbed to hear this news, but there’s nothing we can do to help. Hopefully they are able to stop it.
4. On the lighter side, we also learned that foreigners continue to radically overestimate Marcel’s age. After standing in line outside for two hours, we were all let into the police department, at which point one of the agents singled out Marcel and asked him a question. Katia wasn’t there at the moment, and we didn’t understand what he was asking. Fortunately a woman near us spoke a bit of English (she was there to help her Canadian exchange student daughter register, and we had been chatting with them for a while). She told us that the agent wanted to know how old Marcel was. We answered (46, for any of you wondering). The agent said something else to the woman and then walked away; she told us that he was wondering if Marcel needed special attention because maybe he was over 60! The woman, the exchange student, and multiple other people around us (myself included, of course) all cracked up. But Marcel doesn’t think it’s quite so funny. He’s very annoyed even now, as I write this – he says I’m rubbing salt in the wound – especially because it’s the second time recently that he’s been mistaken for being over 60 when we’ve been in a foreign country. Poor Marcel! As you can see, it's not wise to overestimate his age.

Fernanda reminded me the other day that time is not money in Brazil. The nice thing about that is that you can, at least, try to enjoy all the waiting and bureaucracy, and maybe learn a few things, too.

Image below: We advise you strongly not to inquire if Marcel is over 60, unpredictable reactions can follow :)

Click here for more images from our life in Brazil.

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