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Brazil
Bala
Phonetic pronunciation: bah-lah
Language: Portuguese (from Brazil)
Meaning: bullet and also candy
 
 
Violence and criminality are recurring themes in Brazilian news. People live with that reality, but, since guns don't shoot candy, Fernanda exchanged São Paulo's insecurity for the tranquility of a city with a castle of queens and princesses. By the woods she helped reforest, she is now discovering the delights of participatory democracy and of culture for all. She no longer buys bullets in the supermarket…    

 

 

Fernanda Daniele
Born in São Paulo, Brazil
42 years old
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There’s no way to avoid the issue: the main reason why Fernanda moved to Portugal was the crime rate of São Paulo, her hometown and one of the most populated cities in the world. Having worked as a project manager, a bank consultant and now a real estate agent, she has lived in cities as different as London, Zurich and Miami, but it was always on Brazilian soil that she felt most unsafe. When she became a mother in 2012, decisions had to be made. "It is one thing to worry about one’s own life and quite another to be responsible for someone else's”, she argues.

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Fernanda could then have picked anywhere in the world, but Portugal proved to be the natural choice for two reasons: the comfort of the same language and the fact that the country had already welcomed her sister, who had moved to Santa Maria da Feira due to partnerships that her husband had developed with Portuguese businessmen. The first sister to emigrate adapted quickly, despite the excessive delay in the bureaucratic process of having to recognize her academic skills, without which she couldn’t practice medicine in Portugal. Still, a couple of years later Fernanda followed her sister’s footsteps and, without actually crossing the Atlantic, said goodbye to her husband and daughter in São Paulo: it was them who headed to Portugal first, while she allowed herself to stay for some more time in Brazil taking care of bureaucratic matters and planning the definitive relocation.

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Before Fernanda’s move to Feira, in late 2018, she talked with her family over the phone or the internet, and kept asking for news and updates. Little Isabela would tell her that she already had a school, that she had met other children, that someone had offered her “rebuçados”. “Rebu what?? What is that, baby?”, she asked her daughter, from a distance. “’Bala’, mom! ‘Rebuçado’ is what they call our ‘bala’”. It turned out that Brazil commonly used the same word “bala” both for “bullet” and “candy”, while in Portugal there was a very distinctive term for each meaning. And so it came to be that “bala” was the first expression that Fernanda registered as different in the use of the same language. Reflecting on it later, she felt relieved for not having experienced the reverse: it would be much worse for a Portuguese mother to hear from her son in Brazil something that would mean “I bought bullets”. How quickly and hurtfully would a whole scenario of armed violence run through that woman's brain (and heart)!

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After decades of soap operas with Brazilian pronunciation and years of YouTube tutorials in the same accent, everyone in Fernanda’s new country seems to know that “onibus” is the Brazilian word for the Portuguese “autocarro” [both meaning “bus”), that “caçula” is Brazilian for “rapaz” (which is “boy”), that “cellular” is the same as “telemóvel” (“cell phone”) and that “van” (exactly as in English) means ”carrinha”. For a Brazilian chattering with Portuguese, however, the flow of conversation can be often interrupted by words that he is not used to hearing. What is “atacador”, the shoelace that Brazilian call “cadarço”? What about “formação”, the professional qualification that in Brazil is called “treinamento”? What is the use of a “comboio”, the train that the same Latin Americans call “trem”? Some expressions can even generate very embarrassing moments: in Brazilian Portuguese “fazer um bico /do a beak”, for instance, means “to do some freelance job” while in European Portuguese, more than evoking ornithological mimicry or a tantrum pouting, it mostly refers to “performing oral sex on a man”.

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Linguistic amusements aside, Fernanda discovered in Feira a daily routine which is identical to the one in Brazilian interior cities, with the advantage that, in Portugal, that peacefulness is regularly agitated by large events. "I’m an energetic person and I love ‘Viagem Medieval’ [the local medieval reenactment], Festa das Fogaceiras [the local religious holiday in which girls dressed in white parade with a sweet bread on their head asking for divine protection against the Black Plague], Perlim [an amusement park dedicated to Christmas]", she says enthusiastically. "I like to live in a city with a castle, which is a princess-and-queen thing, and I love the open-air events, because I never had that in Brazil – at least not at affordable prices like here".

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What Fernanda most misses is the warmth of her tropical native country, the sweets and desserts with names different from ours and, in more practical terms, commercial establishments that stay open continuously, with no breaks for lunch. “In São Paulo we could go shopping at any time and here we have to wait. The biggest shock was in August: everything, everything is closed”.

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Of course Fernanda also misses the friends that she cannot embrace on the internet, but she quickly made new ones in Portugal. Even though she notices that some people withdraw a little when they discover her Brazilian accent, she does not let that disturb her and focuses on the positive aspects. "I always preferred to look at the glass as half full," she confesses. In addition, she closely followed the electoral process of the “Young Mayor of Santa Maria da Feira”, an election program for students involving several schools of the municipality, and this confirmed that eventual estrangement really disappears with coexistence. “I’m kind of an aunt-hen and I feared that people would not recognize my nephew's merits just because he is Brazilian, but he ended up winning the election and it was a huge pride! He is very informed and studious, he differentiates himself by debating everything in depth and I was very proud!”.

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This discovery of differences is a two-way street. In Brazil, all the Portuguese people that Fernanda knew were bakery owners and she had always heard that women in Portugal had fluff over their lips. Here, she realized without much surprise that those were myths and ended up uncovering even better things: “It is impressive that teachers are so careful in welcoming our kids. The attention that my daughter receives here from her public school teacher is something that, in Brazil, could only be obtained in a private institution”. If in Brazil the state educational policies leave so much to be desired, it isn’t surprising that the country’s municipal management is also much behind the Portuguese and European standards of civic participation, as can be seen in the most mundane examples. “We had an incredible experience at Quinta do Castelo [in Santa Maria da Feira], with the planting of trees to reforest the entire space,” says Fernanda. “This involvement in actions developed by the municipality is not usual in Brazil and I thought it was something really special. It meant to be part of the history of that place”.

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This proximity is welcome and matches a general attitude of affability that guarantees the Portuguese people the reputation of being one of the most hospitable in the world. After a minimum of contact, the differences in treatment are reduced and the conversations become less formal. "Everything is great, until they tell me to use the ‘Tu’ form of treatment instead as ‘Você’”– something that only has a true correspondence in languages like French (tu versus vous), German (du versus Sie) and Italian (tu versus lei), since in English both formal and informal speakers address others by ‘You’. But Fernanda can’t force herself to change her ways. “I can’t do that”, she explains, concerned about the possibility of hurting someone’s feelings. “Brazilian address everyone with “Você”! It is an addiction of the language – there is no way to change it!”. It is not an excuse, neither does it mean any kind of displeasure about the other. You may check the soap operas. There are millions of episodes to prove it. â– 

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