Bom dia Brasil!

I finished the semester - thank God! - on August 8th and I came to Brasil on August 9th. I flew to Sao Paulo where I took a bus to Campinas to visit my friends Claudio and Victoria and their daughter Luisa. We saw each other 5 years ago last time, when they were in New York. I stayed at Claudio and Victoria´s apartment for a week. They showed me around the city, we went to a few nice places and different districts. The center of the city is mostly modern and looks like a typical South Amercian modern city center, which I described many times before. Claudio teaches at the Unicomp (University of Campinas) and he also showed me around the campus which is very big and consists of many circles of buildings, parks, small eating places for students, library of works published by the university, etc. Claudio and Victoria are also conoisseurs of wine so the evenings were devoted to conversation and wine tasting. On Friday we went to San Sebastian (which is on the coast - about 4 hours´ drive from Campinas) together with Claudio´s sister Renata, her husband Toninho and their two little boys Victor and Philipe. We stayed at Toninho´s parents´vacation house just one block from the beach. A very beautiful and quiet place. We were swinging on hammocks in the garden, talking and resting Friday and Saturday evenings, sharing jokes, also jokes for kids - the kids have a great sense of humor and are very witty - lots of fun. On Saturday we went boating around the beaches of mainland and then on the Ilha Bella - the island nearby. First we visited a small deserted beach. It´s one of these beaches where the selva - the jungle - goes right to the water almost and there are small waterfalls trickling down to the sea, between the rocks. We swam and enjoyed the beach and the sun. On Ilha Bella we went to one of these beaches which have small restaurants with tables and umbrellas on the sand. We enjoyed some drinks and snaks. It was a beautiful day and in the evening I felt this surge of energy I often feel after I immerse myself in the sea water and spend a day close to the shore - must be iodine and ozone in the air and being close to nature. On Sunday morning I parted with the Banzato family and took a bus to Paraty. The bus was going along the Emerald Coast, passing by its many bays, beautiful beaches and Mata Atlantica which is the mountonous jungle. The views were magnificient. I arraived at the city which is of the type I like: small, walkable on foot, old architecture, little restaurants and art galleries. I walked around for a few hours enjoying the charming atmosphere and then sat down with a beer at one of the local bars. There were two tables outside, at one a man was sleeping on his huge belly, and at the other one a man was sitting awake, drinking beer. I sat at the second table and conversation started to flow with Milton - a very nice Brazilian vacationing in Paraty. I love these random conversations with local persons I meet along the way. We said goodbye since I decided to go directly to Rio from there and so I just got on the bus and arrived terribly late, because of delays on the road. I met two friendly Brazilian girls who were on the same bus and one of them took me with her by a taxi to an area where she lived - Botofago - and where I found a youth hostel. There I met the friendly staff and a group of medical students from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Greece who came to Campinas to do an intership at the School of Medicine and were on a weekend excursion, visiting Rio. We had many nice conversations in the evening and at breakfast. The next day, on recommendation of Katie from England who shared a room with me, I went on a tour around the city which included a hike to a mountain peak from which we could see the panorama of the city, the hike to see up close the Christ the Redemptor (much smaller than I have expected), Santa Teresa neighborhood full of bohema and artistic outlet visible on the walls and in general everywhere, and around Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. Afterwards I just went on the Copacabana beach myself and enjoyed the sun, the sand and the Rio experience. It is a city which intimidated me at the beginning, being so vast and so packed with highrised buildings and such huge differences between different parts of the city. But then I got used to its energy, the energy of a place with huge differences between virtually everything. As the guide pointed out, the favellas (the poorest neighborhoods of houses illegally build by the people who immigrated to Rio mainly from the poor regions of northern Brasil) are next to malls of luxurious goods. There is some tension created by this inequality but at the same time there is a feeling of calm and leisure. It seems no matter what the status of the inhabitants they love their Rio de Janerio (the January River). The beaches are beautiful and excessible from almost all parts of the city in a short time, and they are all public, so whether you live in a rich neighborhood or a poor favella you can enjoy the fun on the beach. There are many things to see in Rio but I decided to go to the region of Minas Gerais the next day and come back to Rio another time or a little later. I feel that after the NY experience and feeling so oppressed by a big city I need a different type of atmosphere now - something smaller. I left to the Christ the Redemptor hugging of Rio and decided to hug something huggable to my scale. I decided to go to Ouro Preto, a city famous for its Colonial architecture and mild climate. It is located in a hilly region of Minas Gerais where the mines of precious stones were located and some still are. Ouro Preto is rich in history and I walked and walked, up and down the hills, visiting churches, museums, stores with gems and jewelery. I enjoy this a lot - a city in which I don´t have to take any public transportation and just walk on foot. I stayed at the O Sorriso do Legarto (Smilng Crocodile) hostal which is owned by Washington. Washington is a Gypsy, like me. He spent a long time outside of Brazil and just came back 8 months ago to settle in Ouro Preto. It´s interesting how once you leave your homeland and start leading a Gypsy life you can never call any place a home anymore. Even if you return to where you started from, it doesn´t feel fully home so in a way because you never have a true home your home is everywhere. Such is the life of a Gypsy... I tasted, in the tradition of tasting the local food of places I visit, the comida tipica of Minas Gerais which is the popular food of the miners and which very much resembles the tipical food of Poland - I even found a type of potato dumpling which we have in Poland and which we call "kopytka". The miners knew how to eat well: meats with heavy sauces, potatoes, rich soups. None of the sugarless, fatfree, tasteless stuff. All is full of flavour, cooked in cast steel pots and tastes delicious. What came to my mind as I was eating lunch was that I was born in a mining region of Poland - Silesia - and I feel this connection to mining regions wherever I encounter them. I left Silesia when I was four but the images of a mining town and the tradition connected to mining and miners´life remained in my memory for ever. Having "kopytka" for lunch, with a heavy brown sauce, made with real butter and cream, transferred me into a different time and place. Of places of interest I visited the museum of mining, science and gems which is supposed to have the biggest collection of stones in the world, and the amount of gems was overwhelming, indeed. I also went to Mariana, a smaller old mining town very close to Ouro Preto which was equally charming. The whole region of Minas Gerais is hilly and green and the views were beautiful.


On Thursday afternoon Washington gave me a lift to Belo Horizonte, another big and modern city, and from there I boarded a bus to Brasilia and after 12 hours arrived there. From there I took a bus to Abidania. I passed by Brasilia because, as I mentioned before big cities are not really on my itinerary and also, because I don´t very much like modern architecture. So I got to Abidania - a small city along the expressway, dusty and hot. That region is very dry, semi-desert, and it´s especially hot during the day during winter, when it doesn´t rain. The only reason I went there was to see Jao de Deus or John of God who is a healer and a medium. I have heard about him and looked at what people had to say about him on Youtube and it sounded very interesting. So I walked along the road, about 1km, to a place called Casa de Dom Inacio which is a clinic which Jao founded some 30 years ago to cure people. But he doesn´t really cure anyone, as he says, it is God who cures them with his help. So Jao and I have the same idea on healing. There are entities, or spirits if you like, which pass by the Casa and with whose help he can heal and perform operations (mostly the removal of cancerous tumors), without any anesthesia. After I arrived I learned that the sessions with Jao start at 2 pm (Wed-Fri). I got a room at a pousada right next to Casa (there are many along the road, together with a few restaurants and stores), had lunch, showered, and went to meet with Jao. The Casa consists of a room where people wait to see Jao, a room where you come in line to him and he touches your hand, a room in which people sit and contemplate, separate room for cristal bath (7 big cristals located over chakras and emanating appropriate color), tables outside for eating the daily soup, a library with books and cristals, a pharmacy of herbs which Jao proscribes, a garden and a patio with roof, overlooking the hills. We waited, all dressed in white, and then first went the people whose operations where scheduled that day, then the second-timers went (those who were meeting Jao for the second time) and then the first-timers and I was in that group. While we enetered the room, we passed by people sitting with their eyes closed in deep meditation or transe, some where reaching up as if they wanted to touch somebody (I guess the spirits). We enetered the room with Jao and slowly approached him in line. He held my hand and told me, through a translator, which herbs to take and to come back on Wednesday. I left, led to another room, where I sat and was crying, and crying and crying. They were not tears of joy or sadness, they were the tears of release and it was a similar experience to the one I had with Shanti (to those persons new to my blog, I wrote on the blog about Shanti in May or June of last year). So with tears all that was difficult, all that was impure, all that was burdensome, all that is leaving. These type of tears mean purification. After I have cried for a long time, I felt this lightness and as with Shanti, the palms of my hands got hot and tingly and the top of my head got hot as well. I went to take the cristal bath and felt the waves of energy passing through my entire body. When I got back to the pusada, I had supper, then I went to the patio of the Casa and just enjoyed the cooling of the evening and the sky full of stars. I went to bed at 8 pm and woke up at 8 am. When I can sleep 12 hours peacefully and deeply, I know that my body is purifying and recharging. I went to eat breakfast and talked to the persons staying at the pousada, then to the friendly owner Sandra, then I walked along the road and met the wonderful people of the town. It was peaceful and the good energy was flowing. In Campinas we talked with Claudio (who is a psychiatrist and a philosopher) about healing and about Jao de Deus and whether it´s possible, this type of healing. Claudio also printed out for me a research paper done by a medical doctor, his collegue, who tries to describe the evidence, as scientifically as possible, that Jao´s power to heal indeed exists. In my own experience I can say that it does. I met people who are blessed with such power so I can feel who really is or who is not or pretends to be. In the pousada in which I stayed there was a person who was recovering after the operation. There are no complications and no pain. On the cork board hanging on the wall of the Casa there are simple suggestions as to what to do after operation: basically it´s bed rest for a week. The people who mostly come to Jao are the ones for whom this is the last resort, after everything else has failed. I think these are the people who are most receptive to changing the mindset and who want to really believe in their own healing. I think God helps people such as them. How can you heal anyone who doesn´t believe they can be healed, who got to liking their disease so much that they don´t want to let go of it? And what is a disease, anyways? In the opinion of spiritual doctors, any spiritual doctors regardless of medicine they practice, the disease is a certain perspective. It is most difficult for people to change the perspective. Once they are runnig on a certain track it is difficult to change it. I see it in the acupuncture clinic at school. Sometimes it takes reaching the bottom or rather a dead end to look for a different track. So, coming back to my personal experience, Jao told me to come see him on Wednesday but I decided to leave on Saturday because I didn´t feel it was the right time for me to stay so many days in Abidania. And I always go with my intuition which comes from the communication with the Great Spirit. I respect all people, Jao among them, and I love them - it´s love of the Creation which is perfect, no matter how imperfectly it may present itself. The perfect creation, however, always has the imperfection in it, no matter how wise and cultivated, so this is the reason why I can never follow a man or any religion or ritual he has invented. I think Coubert would like my discourse... For those living in NY or vicinity: Jao will be at the Omega Institute in Rhineback in NY from 28 September to 2 October.

From Abidania I came to Salvador de Bahia, an incredibly interesting place. It is a big city but of so many flavours that it doesn´t seem oppressive as the other ones. Maybe because it´s built along the bahia - the bay - and it feels like a city built on the beach. It was recommended by everyone so I decided to see for myself if I can like it. And I do, very much. I am staying close to the Centro Historico, in Pelurinho - old part of town, full of bohemian atmosphere and charm. Today there´s a local party which means there´s music everywhere on the streets and people are dancing and walking around with glasses of capirinha - a most famous Brazilian drink - and beer (without the brown paper bags, imagine that!). I will write more about this amazing place soon. Until then bom noche everyone and many hugs from Salvador.