Um dia na vida

Humans are weirdly adaptable. The unusual becomes the mundane surprisingly quickly. So before I get too accustomed to cultural differences – like clapping, for instance, instead of knocking, to announce my arrival at someone’s house – I’d like to recap an average day in my particular line of fieldwork.

6:00 a.m. – Alarm goes off. Snooze.

6:05 a.m. – Alarm goes off. I get up because I have so much to do today. Begin with coffee. In the house we use a drip coffee maker and a Folgers-ish brand of coffee. Brazilians like their coffee SWEET, so after I make a pot I put some off to the side for myself and dump a bunch of sugar, seriously, like ¾ cup, in the rest.

6:18 a.m. – Next, compile all the material I’ll need for morning “visits,” which is what I call bothering pregnant women and newborn infants otherwise going about their day. I currently have 128 women enrolled in my study. I can’t pay women for participating but I’m allowed to give them small “tokens of appreciation” (IRB phrase). Because they’re having babies, and babies apparently require stuff, I put together little packages of diapers (clean, obviously), sometimes a receiving blanket, onesies (I haven’t seen any onesies in Brazil – people seem a little skeptical), baby soap, my mom made some really pretty quilts and crocheted blankets, etc. I keep track of what I give whom and when. I started this because I didn’t want one baby to end up with 45 pairs of little booties (also courtesy of my mom). However, with 128 moms-to-be, and about 18 visits per person throughout the course of my research, this is a BIG task. I wish I could get a publishable paper out of it. Maybe in the humanities (kidding!).

6:52 a.m. – Two kids in the house are getting ready for school. Note: other than me, there are no awake adults. The kids’ heads bob with sleep, one of them stands in the kitchen brushing his teeth with his backpack on. There seem to be no alarm clocks in the house, certainly no clocks. I wonder – how does this event occur?

7:00 a.m. – I also need to get together forms for collecting actual, scientific data, or the reason I am here. I have 10 different forms for various purposes. I don’t need 10 forms for each person for each visit, but sometimes I need 1, and sometimes I need 3, sometimes 6, so I have to figure this out for each woman and/or baby, depending on what stage of pregnancy she’s in, what interviews I’ve done, what the baby is eating.

Usually I do about 8 visits a day, 4 before lunch and 4 after. Visits can last 15 minutes, sometimes over an hour, depending on what I need to do. But speaking in Portuguese the whole time, keeping track of things and forms, distracting small children with balloons and cheap trinkets, traveling by bike with adult and pediatric scales and sometimes a lawn chair (will explain at a later time), in 97% humidity and direct equatorial sun makes 2 hours of work feel more like 20. Hmm . . . due to a recent week-long vacation with my spouse in the metropolis of Belém, I have 17 visits scheduled today.

7:01 a.m. – Wondering why I thought recruiting 128 people was a good idea.

8:44 a.m. – Leave the house for my first visit, which was scheduled for 8:30. Whatever – it’s Brazil! I’m probably early.

9:26 a.m. – In a neighborhood called Portelinha, “little Portel.” Yesterday I ran into someone I’d been working with but had moved. Lots of places, especially in Portelinha, don’t have numbers or even road names, or even roads, for that matter. Usually I need a person to take me there, which she did, so I can continue research with her. I park my bike outside her house and it falls over for the 1^st time today. (At least I’m not on it.) I need to get the kickstand fixed. Here the kickstand is called a descansa, as in “relax.” My bike is super relaxed, on the ground.

10:27 a.m. – Visit a mom-to-be who has 4 cute kids already. The youngest kid is in the house hanging out with his mom, whom I’m measuring. His brow is furrowed so that he resembles a small, worried man. I blow up a balloon and give it to him. He tucks it under his arm and continues to look worried.

11:03 a.m. – This visit I do in a bar, where the mom-to-be works. For some reason (you can use your imagination) there’s a bed in a room in the back of the bar. This is where I usually measure this woman’s belly. This morning the bed is occupied – again, use your imagination – so the woman hops up on the pool table. It works, though the angle is a little different than what I’m used to.

11:22 a.m. Walk outside. My bike has fallen for the 2^nd time.

12:36 p.m. – Morning visits finally over. I stop by the grocery store near my house and buy a (sadly, not local) cucumber for lunch. I know the produce shipment comes in on tomorrow so I don’t bother with anything else. Lunch here is more like it is in Europe – a big meal during the day and then something lighter for dinner. Today we have grilled fish (which is local – and super delicious), açaí, farinha, cucumber salad. The smallest person in the house, who’s three, thinks if he screams everything he wants, people will give it to him. Unsurprisingly, it works.

1:14 p.m. – It is one billion degrees outside. I would prefer a nap in front of my fan but I need to plan for my afternoon visits.

2:11 p.m. – Leave the house for my 2:00 visit, because I’m in Brazil. It is still insanely hot – the sun feels like a killer death ray. Usually I don’t schedule visits until 3:00 at the earliest but this person needs me to come early. No one but me and, strangely, a guy selling phone credits at a fold-out table, is outside.

2:43 p.m. – I visit a woman I’ll call “Maria.” There’s a dog in the yard and I’m not sure how friendly it is, so I knock on the gate (no one heard my clapping) and ask for “Maria.” Of course, “Maria” has a nickname I have never heard even though I’ve been to this house 4 or 5 times, so it takes a while to clarify the reason I’m here. (Recently I found out that I, too, have a nickname – a loura dos bebês, “the blond of the babies.” When I pointed out that I’m not considered blond in the U.S., people said, “But you are here!”) I’m early. I wake “Maria” up, and I wake up her one-and-a-half-year-old son. He’s crying because 1) he hates me and 2) he’s had diarrhea for three days. I do the visit as fast as I can, try to remember the recipe for home-made oral rehydration solution, wonder if Brazilian Gatorade is an acceptable substitute, tell her to make sure he drinks tons of water and goes to the doctor.

3:25 p.m. – Wait to meet my assistant at the school where he’s a sign-language interpreter. (Sadly and incredibly, many students who are unable to hear have not been taught to read, so if my assistant is not at school, these kids have no way of understanding anything.) I wait for 30 minutes and finally check my phone to see a text saying he’s not coming. All is not lost! This period of waiting has given me plenty of time to talk to students, who come out with predictable things like, “Where are you from?” and “Say something in English!” but also, “Can you have a baby and give it to me?” (I think this is in relation to my Brazilian “blondness”) and “Are there dwarfs in the U.S.?”

4:18 p.m. – I have become a Coca Cola addict. It really is better with sugar than corn syrup. I stop in a little shop and buy an icy can. While I’m standing there drinking (and burping a little), a man says to me, “A little hot?” I prefer this to, “You’re so red!” the thing most people say to me.

4:39 p.m. – Another visit. Today everyone’s belly seems lopsided, like the babies are on one side or the other of the woman. Maybe it’s the heat.

5:06 p.m. – Visit a woman who has a son who looks like a tiny and prematurely wise version of Buddha. He is afraid of me so I give him a little plastic car. However, he won’t come near me to get it and it’s so cheap I can’t really roll it toward him. I feel like I’m trying to coax a stray cat to food. During this visit I recruit a friend of the person I’m visiting. 129!

5:14 p.m. – Catch up with my assistant, who happens to speak very good English. While we’re on our bikes going to houses, we have a discussion about the pronunciation of the English words “ball,” “bowl,” and “bawl,” – it’s hard when you think about it. We also discuss the word “poop.” This came up because yesterday I weighed a baby and then realized he had a full diaper. I changed the diaper (i.e., the midwife did all the work after I got poop everywhere), and reweighed him – he had lost 300 grams! That’s like over ½ a pound! Anyway, my assistant was trying to tell me that the baby was still pooping, but he didn’t know if you could use “poop” as a verb. This baby knew.

5:25 p.m. – Bike falls 3^rd time. It’s starting to remind me of a dying horse.

5:38 p.m. – Visit a house with the 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th children today who are extremely unhappy to see me. It goes against my moral fiber but I have brought pirulitos (lollipops) specifically for this visit, thinking the kids would be less likely to scream with something in their mouths. However, it just means that the crying is combined with a sticky, offensively pink drool running down the kids’ bellies.

6:55 p.m. – Get home finally. Unload everything from my bike. One of the kids in the house asks, resignedly, if I need help with my stuff. His head is leaning to the side like it’s too heavy for his neck, sort of like he had a hard day but is fulfilling his duties, willing to help but dog-tired. I tell him to rest his little 4-year-old body.

7:24 p.m. – I step on one huge-ass, mean, angry ant in the bathroom while I’m taking a shower and it bites me. I thought I had cut my foot it hurt so bad, the kind of pain that gives you chills. I get dressed and the kids and I work on killing these for a while (i.e., their mother kills the ants with her bare feet, the kids and I watch).

8:57 p.m. – I am so tired I’m not even hungry. I putter around in the kitchen, find some bread from breakfast hidden from the kids (seriously, they’re like a plague of locusts, they will find and eat everything), make a sandwich with some Trader Joe’s organic peanut butter (also hidden), which now has a huge carbon footprint being that it traveled ~4,000 mile to reach me via my spouse.

9:21 p.m. – I have a huge stack of data forms I need to enter into the computer – it’s insane. I check the calendar for tomorrow. It looks a lot like today. Just the usual.