Joe,
You're great. Period. Keep writing it, keep doing it.
One bone to pick, I'm an American woman, fiftyish, no husband and I have spent the last two-and-a-half years going back and forth between backwoods Florida and Salvador, Brazil. I think perhaps in one more year I will be able to live there. (I too came home after years in Manhattan, and the local state of mind needed kicking same as yours, but I think it is my own that got kicked.)
In Brazil, I started two volunteer programs teaching music, one in an exceptional favela (Candeal, of Carlinhos Brown fame) and the other one at UFBA, the university in Salvador. I took 18 American students down to study drumming with Afro-Brazilian teachers and with the profit brought instruments for my Brazilian students and taught for two months. However, I now know my project was a two edged sword. I thought in two months I could do something and they could carry on without me, but it wasn't long enough, and perhaps it would have been better not to go in the first place if I couldn't be there for the long haul. That was in Candeal, the program at the college fared better.
But my bone to pick is that I worked just as hard as you or any man to try to do something good and try to move myself to another country. And I don't speak Portuguese and I had no one there to take care of me when I first went there completely alone. And I can't be the only woman doing this.
But I have a whole new life from this, richer by far than I could ever imagine -- a new life producing recordings of traditional music and shooting music videos of the Orixas´ -- the Afro Brazilian deities and wonderful new friends. And through this I hope that the performers I'm working with and I too, will have a new and more sustainable life. And it really doesn't matter that the men continue to think they are the only ones doing it.
Kindest regards,
Layne Redmond
Chiefland, Florida
www.layneredmond.com
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I agree totally, sister.
I know I generalize a bit sometimes, mostly because too many qualifiers slow down the reading, make it less "swift" in moving along through ideas. Americans, especially in this Internet and television age, have extremely short attention spans. So I keep dancing as fast as I can before they drag out the ankle hook and yank me off the little stage of Internet posting for being too dull. I am completely aware that thousands of strong women are doing plenty. Also, that American men are certainly no braver and are as afraid to take chances as anyone else. I hope you can forgive these occasional generalizations, these things that are true of the average middle class household, generally speaking.
I try to write from a common experience as a common American and avoid political correctness. There are just too many liberal camps of identity and issues for me to attempt that, though I did for years. Them that's doin right, knows they is doin right, minority among us that they are, be they male or female.
Anyhooo ... You have my humble admiration for your good work. As to: "Ain't I a woman?", you sure the hell are, and a great one too.
Solidarity,
Joe
