Londrina, October 14

This evening I was again with the old Macumba priestess, Dona Jacinta. She is of imposing appearance, vital, strong, tolerant and unwavering. One can imagine that she would be honored in heathen Africa as a symbol of the Earth Mother. You feel well in her presence, she exudes calmness.

She led me into her Macumba-room. On one side are wooden benches, in the opposite corner stands her altar with its countless holy figures. Many gods have Christian as well as heathen names. For example St. George is Ogún, the god of war in the African religion. St. Michael corresponds to Xangó, the god of thunder and lightning. Yemanjá, the sea-goddess, is the Virgin Mary. Exú is the Devil and Oxalá, the god of life and fertility, corresponds to Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Dona Jacinta offered to read the cards for me. From a pocket in her wide gown she took out a deck of well-thumbed cards on which I caught fleeting glimpses of plants, houses, the moon and stars. She laid them down on the table with a slow gesture and crossed herself and the cards. I had to cut them (No, with the left hand), and she began.

You have many protective gods, especially the sun. Soon you will make an important decision and, later on, not live in Germany. You will have a very troubled life, put much in order, much in disorder, minha filha.

When I told her that I often have headaches, she offered to "push my head right". So I will soon put myself under her care. She has a thriving medical practice, even people from the wealthy neighborhoods visit her. I asked her how long she had been doing this work.

Minha Filha, I began in Bahia. I lived in the country where my parents had a tiny piece of land to grow sugarcane. I was strong, wild and unruly (braba). I loved to ride wild horses all day long. Now and then I had a namorado (boyfriend). Suddenly I became very ill. A doctor treated me but he couldn't help. Then someone told me, "Go to the Macumbeiro! I went and the spirit came over me and shook off the illness. But the most important thing was that my nature changed. I became gentle (mansa), tolerant, calm. Octal ordered me to work, so I became a Macumbeira."

And what does the Catholic Church say to this?

The Church does not like it. But what can she do against it? There will always be Macumba in the favela. The poor receive comfort and support from me which the impersonal machinery of the Catholic Church cannot give them. I bless each one personally, whereas the Catholic priest only does mass blessings. All find in me an open ear for their troubles, while the Catholic Church is a church for the rich only. I am a Catholic myself. One can do both. Macumba is a way to experience faith physically. Each should come to God in the way He is most visible. The sea-goddess Yemanjá and the Virgin Mary, the spirit Xangó and St. Hieronymous: are they not the same gods who have descended to earth in different forms? Just as Catholics have their saints we also have them, often Black and Indian martyrs from the slavery time. Only God knows the truth, men must be tolerant.

Londrina, Oct. 26

We have just returned from a Fazenda, a real cattle ranch, the house airily built, the birds flying in one side and out the other. The eye ranges over the extensive hilly land and the cleared jungle with burnt-out tree stumps. We met the owner, a former agriculture minister and Prefect of Londrina, as he was inoculating his cattle against a skin disease. The Dona da casa brought us creamy milk, finally undiluted with water. She greeted us cordially, but apparently goes through Brazil with her eyes closed, because we had to tell her about favelas in detail as she has yet to see one.

One can hardly imagine how rich these people are. Fray Nereu told us recently that a rancher he knows earned $160,000 this year alone - while there are favela children who have never played with a doll. Brazilians also think almost exclusively in terms of these extreme contrasts. They often don't know how they should classify us. I realized this when the son of the owner of the Funganti department store, made uncertain by our living in the favela and at the same time frequenting the country club, asked: Are you rich or poor?

Londrina, Nov. 6

Four days leave from the favela! A jeep from the prefecture picked us up and we drove over hard-packed red earth roads to a lake in the middle of the jungle where the prefecture owns a holiday house for city employees and "other important persons".

The weather was cool, sunny, clear air like in the mountains, wonderful for hiking, walking and physical exertion. In the morning we walked on narrow paths hacked through the jungle to a huge waterfall. In the afternoon I went off alone. It's somehow uncanny the cracking of twigs by unseen animals in the underbrush, the birds' warning cries becoming increasingly shrill as you draw nearer. You feel lost amid this exuberant growth of upward striving, thorny brush, bamboo cane swaying in the wind, ninety feet high pinhieros (pines) and coconut palms, especially when the midday heat weighs so crushingly on the earth. Once we got up at 4 a.m. and explored the lake shore and its side-streams in a boat. They were often so narrow that the jungle closed in again behind us, over us a steep wall of green. Steering the boat was an artistic feat that won me the title "King of Helmsmen". We navigated thus for almost seven hours. Meanwhile hunger drove us to land and luckily I recognized a sugar-cane field from a distance; chewing sugar-cane and quite full we went on.

Another time a ranch owner's son, an ex-boy scout, took us out. He was an interesting mixture of Portuguese, African and Brazilian Indian blood (his facial characteristics seemed pure southern India). He led us through once cleared but now heavily overgrown jungle and showed us Indian medicinal herbs against rheumatism, colds, boils.

I often visit the black Macumba lady which, unfortunately, usually includes food. Can you imagine how much gagging you have to do to get dry manioca meal down? Her healing practice is apparently flourishing. Recently an alcoholic of German descent from Rio Grande do Sul went to her to be cured. Dona Jacinta has a caixa postal (post office box) to receive letters of thanks, although she can't read.

This evening we were elegant again. An invitation to the opening of an antique furniture shop. The problem of how to get from the dripping, muddy favela to the city was solved in the classic manner: the prefect happened to be visiting and he drove us in. How unnatural you act when you want to be elegant. We had to laugh at the affected fussing and twittering of the heavily powdered and dazzlingly painted ladies (lilac tinted hair to match a lilac dress), the fashionably pursed lips, the bare traces of smiles. We moved about in the crowd and now and then retreated to a corner to laugh our heads off. The German pastor's reproachful look (raised eyebrow, severe lines around his mouth) is worth mentioning, and his words: But I've never seen you in my church. Deus me livre (God forbid).

Londrina, Christmas 1965

We were invited to spend Christmas with a Brazilian family from Guarpava (South Paraná). We went via Apucarana, Ponta Grossa. The asphalt ends there and the route continues over the terra roxa, "roads" so bumpy, muddy and full of holes that the bus often listed like a ship; then came another strip of asphalt; our speed seemed that of an airplane on the runway. The monotonous landscape is relieved in Paranoia by pasture land with scattered cows and occasional jungle.

After a fourteen hour drive we reached Guarapava. How rich our hosts were we couldn't have imagined. When we learned through snatches of conversation that half the city (electricity and water works, fertilizer factory, sawmill, cattle and pig raising) belongs to them we put aside our humbleness and abandoned ourselves to gluttony. We paid no attention to ordinary stomach-fillers such as rice and potatoes; only fruit, vegetables, nuts, cake and meat, meat, meat did we eat. Meals were taken in a special wooden building, a dining-house, so to speak, in which the churrasco, (roast meat) was cooked on spits over an open fire. The spits with half a pig, goats and oxen were stuck into the wooden table at which we were all seated and each cut off as much as he wanted. What a treat for our stomachs so used to rice and beans!

We spent one afternoon at the German colony Entre Rios. The landscape was transformed with a stroke -- waving wheat fields, orderly juicy green pastures with black and white cows -- a piece of Germany. The contrast with the barely cultivated land we were used to was so great that we began to vehemently debate about why Brazilians don't manage to do the same. I think that the Brazilian fazendeiro's relationship to the earth is different from a German's. The German farmer cherishes and cultivates his land, which becomes the embodiment of his home. The fazendeiro is more an administrator of property, from which he exacts the greatest profit with the least effort, than a farmer. The intensive cultivation of a small piece of land doesn't interest him. He operates an extensive cattle business or plants one crop over a huge area until the land is exhausted (sugarcane, tobacco, coffee). Historically this is understandable. The Portuguese came as adventurers and merchants and not as land-hungry farmers. Their strength lay in exploring the interior, not in cultivating the discovered. Nor did the nomadic Indian tribes contribute to the creation of the farming ethic. They lived from hunting and fishing, burned out clearings here and there in the jungle in order to plant manioca, corn and tobacco, then abandoned the exhausted land. The present day jungle burning and the lack of fertilizer is reminiscent of those methods.

But back to the German colonists. The majority of them came from Banat (Yugoslavia), the so-called Danube Germans. After the Second World War they fled and the Swiss foreign aid organizations gave them a few acres of land in Brazil, some cows and a little money. They started with practically nothing, planted wheat (rare in Brazil) and many have become so rich that they are overwhelmed by their steadily growing lands and income. These Danube Germans hold Brazilian citizenship but speak faltering Portuguese and are very anxious to preserve the heritage of their forefathers.

As with so many German immigrants they identify with a Germany which no longer exists, sing folk-songs which we would call sentimental and talk about a Germany in which it is impossible to be free. The Germany of the nineteenth century and the world depression have been spiritually mummified here.