Sao Paulo Guarlulhos Airport

Customs was a breeze. Gotta love a country that has futbol games playing on Samsung big screen TVs to entertain the folks stuck in a bottlenecked immigration line. Gol! Talk about good first impressions. The airport is comforting after a long ass flight, in which my erstwhile dickwad of a neighbor spilled his entire drink on me, waking me from sleep, and then, after wiping himself dry, turned aside and reclined back into a deep slumber without offering a word of apology or acknowledgement. Grrr… so I spent most of the flight sitting on a wet seat, with wet-ass pants that looked like I pissed myself, steaming as I watched “Sicko” and “The Simpsons Movie.” It could’ve been worse. But inconsiderate people sitting next to you make for long, trying flights…
Anyhow, this airport in Sao Paulo is OK. I’m stuck here for 7 hours waiting for my flight to Salvador, so I grabbed a “Sandwiche con Chester Club” and Café com Leite from a nice little restaurant, and people-watched while going over my Brazilian Portuguese phrase book The language barrier here is going to be rough, because people have been talking at me as if I’m supposed to understand them, and although my Spanish is good enough to comprehend most of what comes my way in Spanish, this Portuguese is looser, the phonetic sounds are different, and it’s got a different lilt to it. All “zh” and “ou” and “nh”. Communication is going to be a challenge…
The first 6 people to talk to me in this beautiful country were all soliciting for money at the airport. A very pretty teenage girl accompanied by her elderly, and clearly unhealthy mother, pleading for charity with big wide eyes. A chubby child with a backpack, rubbing his fingers together in the universal baksheesh gesture. A woman from an organization handing out “AIDS Awareness” pamphlets and pins. Another woman dropping “I Am Deaf / Donations Accepted” leaflets on café tables, and then collecting them a few minutes later. There’s a lot of poverty lurking in this airport, hustlers and people in need canvassing the folks passing through in the hopes of coming across a generous foreigner. The airport in Dhaka used to be the same way, except most of the fakirs were waiting outside for you, and once you left the building you were damn near assaulted by a horde of crippled beggars and heartbreakingly cute kids in rags pleading with you for money, with their hands out in practiced gestures. Talk about a trigger for liberal guilt... Poverty is a difficult subject to navigate, and its omnipresence in the world is offset by our cultivated detachment from it. There’s a way to give, to be charitable, to truly help people and communities rise from their circumstances to better themselves. Microcredit, certain charities, certain programs, they’re all viable options that have proven track records for improving people’s overall state of being. I don’t know that giving strangers money in airports is really productive beyond the immediate… or maybe I’m just trying to justify my stinginess, my lack of generosity, my tight-fisted first few hours in this new country. I’ll find a way to give back once I’ve been here for a second….