Wait, did anyone hear that they were communist?

How am i? we have weekend "excursions", completely unsurpervised and unprogrammed, while we're here, and got to go to stay with the MST [moradores sem terra] (this big communist group that believes that agrobusiness is bad and took their land away,which is true and they deserve land as rural workers and they took it and people died defending it from the government and it's really cool; they even have liaisons with cuba for studying medicine and stuff). it was insane because we lived with them for two days and hardly learned about their policies and i instead got to watch my classmates take pictures of the "adorable children". which reminded me of unicef ads. when you go to a foreign country and you're making friends, i understand the propulsion to take pictures, but sometimes, it borders on exploitation, which is really weird for me. It makes me really upset because I feel like we use these “third-world cute kids” to make ourselves mask the actual situations we’re observing and our own disgusting prejudice. I hate it partially because i don't connect to kids really well at this point in my life (i'll be the first to admit that it's a proponent of my insecurities that still lingers even since i've bloomed into who i am today), and partially because, we didn't learn about why these people are in make-shift camps and doing major community organizing for their lives. we just played with children and took their photographs and forged fake connections with them after not really knowing them much at all after 2 days, you know?
then i came back into yom kippur, which i showered really quickly before and then basically locked myself up in my room to the sound of partying outside (people here in my neighbourhood party every day of the week except wednesday and thursday). i had to work during fast on reading, which made it much less holy andwhich i think is the reason g-d didn't speak to me in some way. i spoke aloud my resolutions for this new year (be closer to friends and family, seize all my opportunities when i can, and be more physically connected and healthy with myself), and it was more or less positive. but the problem is that, and also the reason that i didn't go to synagogue for the services, because there are some random ones here lurking in the shadows (apparently, the first synagogue in south america was here in salvador, but i can't find it :-( it's really sketchy and has no address listing i've ever seen and everyone who's natural to this area thinks it's ridiculous thatg there're any jews here, that's how semi-clandestine they are here): there's just no community i feel apart of here for prayer. no jews i really have a center already established to grow with during the new year here. it was kind of like being a community in myself, and that gets kind of lonely after 10 days of new year. it was a little sad, but hey, made me stronger and made me realize that i really need a jewish community in the future to live near/with. basically, now i know that i'll be going to israel for 2 years after peace corps after finishing brown. i'm an obsessive planner.
back to it: and then, last week, we went to an AIDS day care for little kids. and i was so confused. i cried and had to leave while no one was watching. here i am, the product of a womyn basically tricked into a disease before people knew what it was, who avoided at all costs my being infected by even not breast-feeding me, losing that connection, just to see these kids today. with opportunistic infections that make themhave uncontrollable diarrhea and ear infections in hospitals for 15 days, and we read them story books? it's not bad, just confusing. no one here could understand the depth of AIDS. nobody. not one of them. It really upset me but I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. The head of the day care came outside while I was there and asked me (after a couple tries in Portuguese) in English whether or not I was sad, and I just lied and said not really. I felt so ashamed. How can I cry when these kids should have nothing to cry about, or be ashamed of? Should I not be upset? It was really confusing and I’m still not okay with it. And I’ll be working there with HIV-infected young mothers and getting more contacts through them, so it’s gonna be really hard. I don’t know. This’d all be alot easier if more people here in my program weren’t so fucking ignorant and still thought they understood public health and therefore came to Brazil. Iknow that’s negative, but race and class and HIV are big deals. You should get them before coming here. Is that really obnoxious? I’m really confused about what I should be feeling right now.
it was tough. basically, I'M learning a lot, and visiting a lot, but getting frustrated that people still think i'm not speaking portuguese when i do, yet i feel like i speak pretty competently. i can't tell if it's a mixture of racism and confusion, because the other students get understood just fine, or if i'm really awful.
happy note: family is slightly better. they stopped talking to me as if i was a jackass when they came home and saw i was having a full-out convo with the repair man and he liked my company. SURPRISE! i know how to speak portuguese. IF YOU TALKED TO ME, YOU'D KNOW THAT! growl.

more blog updates to come, things have gotten a lot better recently. like, i stayed with a bunch of communists! credit of quote above going to: ignorant comment #198756478569378 on this trip.