The Joys of Being Foreign

An occasional series, devoted to the many and varied ‘learning experiences’ one encounters along the road to fluency in a foreign language.

JESUS CHRIST, SAVE ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS…

Brazil is a mahoosively Catholic country. The churches are packed out for Mass every evening, and it’s only just beginning to sink in that all those ‘God will keep me safe’ and ‘Jesus is walking with me’ t-shirts and bumper stickers you see everywhere aren’t meant to be ironic. Coming from England and seeing slogans like ‘Jesus is coming’, you kind of expect stuff like ‘…look busy’.

I'll chat to anyone to practise my Portuguese, so I’m constantly falling into the clutches of the Random Converters. These people start conversations so that thirty seconds into them, they can hand you a little printed tract and ask if you’ve accepted “Jeh-zoo-ees Crees-toh” into your life. They’re mostly perfectly nice, so I don’t want to be rude (ie honest), and I find myself apologetically explaining that my parents were atheists and it’s very hard to develop faith if you weren’t brought up into it.

Unfortunately, some of them, like the guy I was just trying to buy bread from, take that as a challenge; finally, a chance to prove their devotion AND save another soul! Or the woman in the supermarket whose daughter was talking to me at the fish counter (where she was poking all the fish’s eyes out with somewhat un-Christian glee; a future Torquemada, perhaps?). The weird thing is, after a monologue masquerading as a conversation thanks to the occasional ‘But…’ from me, they all have the same parting shot. “Jesus Loves You!”, they say, nodding significantly, and I try and look as if I’ll certainly give it some thought.

However, that phrase just reminds me of Salvador. The favelas there, like those in Rio, are perched on the steepest, muddiest, most prone-to-landslides-causing-multiple-deaths-every-time-it-rains-a-bit hillsides above the city, so they’re generally visible from the streets. In this case, someone had picked their way up the dirt roads and across the overflowing gutters, and bothered to whitewash the wall of a shack just so they could stencil “JESUS TE AMA” in stentorian black capitals on it. At the time, I felt genuinely guilty about the thought that came unbidden into my head: “Well, maybe so, but he doesn’t seem all that bothered about you, does he?”. Luckily, I've now realised that Satan must have put it there.