It has been over a week since I've last posted. I've been living in the guesthouse of a Buddhist temple here in Sao Paulo, which has been a fascinating experience. There are four nuns that live here, and one other person who lives in the guesthouse. Overall, I have been very glad to have had this experience. I am about to move to student housing after an unsuccessful quest for a Chinese homestay (see below). The guesthouse will be needed in the next week for a convocation of monks coming from the United States.
My time in Sao Paulo has been wrought with difficulties. My SLR camera has failed and it looks like the shop -- an authorized Canon dealer -- will not be able to fix it. I believe the problem is with the camera software, and not the actual camera itself, which means that probably only Canon will be able to deal with the problem.
On the project front, the Chinese community here is in crisis. There has been a recent spate of robberies, and more alarmingly, four murders in the past two months. All the murders have been of Chinese merchants in the 25 de March area. There is much speculation as to why this is happening: distrust between the Chinese merchant community and the Brazilians who work for them, distrust among the different Chinese clans; distrust within the different Chinese clans -- with the added twist of the Chinese mafia. These events have put the entire community on edge, perhaps reinforcing the clannish tendencies of the Chinese community.
Obviously, this makes for a fascinating case study of the Chinese population here, but has also made it doubly difficult for me to make way into a community deeply suspicious of outsiders, and made it impossible for me to find a homestay with a Chinese family.
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