more life on mars

We are in the middle of the cerrado, the Brazilian Savannah. The city was built on a whim and a prayer, when a would -be president and an outrageously ambitious and cerebral architect got together; they promised their nation an inland empire.

Nessa and I grew up in the south part of California. We also studied in the farthest part, but never out of SoCal. We were married there, too. We were in an milieu of blessed, coastal consistency.

While I was often pulled in many directions, say when I had to focus on a pre-calculus problem—I was always in the arid, sunny-fog of the California chaparral. Yes, I always felt and quartered by life—but that’s kind of my thing. Do the best you can while four horses are pulling at every appendage, cognitively.

The students at Escola Americana de Brasilia (EAB), where we currently are teaching, is chock full of 4-18-year-olds that have been drawn and quartered geographically. Of course, the metaphor breaks down, when you see how they navigate Brazil as world citizens.

In fact, I’m astounded at the peaceful, easy-going nature of kids from embassies. They are torn from their tiny roots in, say, Kathmandu, then planted in loose, red soil here. And they flow with it.

They ease into relationships; they integrate (from time to time), with the Brazilian kids who’ve been here longer; they find their land and make a stand, and become excited about their opportunities.


Our headmaster recently sent us an email that kind of breaks down this intense and beautiful multiplicity of experience:

Just this year (in addition to Nessa, myself and another 11 teachers), the school has seen 100 new faces.

Amidst these faces are the following beautiful anomalies to a simple life in one small country:

New Faces: EAB has over 100 new faces (students and teachers) this year. Faces from 51 countries; and for the first time in a long time, we have families from Cyprus, Panama, Portugal and Holland. We have also received families with fascinating cultural combinations. Here are a few:

A Japanese student born in Rio, and a Brazilian born in Japan.

An Indian born in China, and a Brazilian born in Israel.

Children from a British family born in Italy and Colombia.
A young lady, born in Nepal, to an Italian father and a Korean mother.

The school also has a four-year-old girl who speaks four languages.

I've got 2.1 languages in 28.9 years.

Clearly, I've got some extracurricular work to do.

life on mars

The Mothership: the Honestino Guimaraes Museu--located where the left wing meets the fuselage in our plane-shaped city center.

On our first walk down to Escola Americana de Brasilia we spotted two little owls, perched on a green bar behind our lower commercial street.


We stopped and stared at each other for a while, then passed on to our first day of teaching. Little, wise prophets, perched and signifying nothing—except maybe that we had left the mothership of our former lives, and were taking the first steps into a world with a slightly different gravity.

The following day, Friday, the school took us out on the lake for dinner, drinking and dancing. While I didn’t take part in the drinking (aside from a few sips of Nessa’s fresh strawberry Caiparinha), I experienced something near to death by dehydration. We are in the high desert, and the body dries, the energy wanes, and in bad cases, like mine, the body tries to turn inside-out in its insistent retching.

After a trip to the hospital, where I was given a “miracle IV,”I started to feel well enough to exchange physical angst for the great weight of shame. I had just made blubbering mess of myself on the mess deck of a lake-barge, and I had to be held by a maintenance man named Helio or I would have fallen off the dock. I’ve made better first impressions on an entire new staff.

That said, before my massive Technicolor yawns, the trip across lake Paranoá was spectacular, considering it was a treat of the school. We went under the suspended bridge which connects the city proper to the ritzier lake district, criss-crossing the road with the architectural panache that characterizes everything except the dorm-like “blocos” that flank the two outstretched wings of the residential city. We saw the moon rise as we passed through the bridge. The dinner was catered, the bar, open, and the school in its entirety—from the people that clean the rooms to the headmaster to the head of the board—were all enjoying life in Brasilia together.



Nessa has been socializing at the embassies. She's spent an afternoon at an eastern buffet at the Malaysian embassy, and spent happy hour at the British embassy this Friday. In order to get in to the latter, she had to let them take digital pictures of the front and back of her ID, digital pictures of her front and back of her self, and then, she says, "a magic door openned."

We could get used to life on Mars.

Memorial for Juscelino Kubitschek: the man who built the city in 5 years.

Inside the Catedral

John posing with São João

Mark meeting São Marcos

The Catedral Metrapolitana de Brasilia

My new boss and I sporting blue. He sports 6'6", I reach for 5'11"