A Martian Sends A Postcard Home.

Sometimes São Paulo is not an easy place to live. It rained properly last night for the first time in about six weeks. Last year, it didn’t rain for 77 days straight during this period, which is practically a Biblical drought, and when it did finally rain, everyone in the flats above and below and opposite ran to their windows and cheered.

The problem is that when it’s dry for as long as this, everyone gets sick. You need rain here because it suppresses the pollution, washing the streets clean, rinsing the air. With no rain, the pollution aggravates respiratory problems and viruses spread like wildfire.

Take our family. The four of us got back to São Paulo at the end of July. Since that time, at least one of us has always been ill, and more often than not it’s been several of us at once, navigating a coughing, crapping, shivering path through the following maladies:

Laryngitis
Sinusitis
Ear infection
Bacterial pneumonia
Flu
Non-specific gastric bug (diarrhoea and vomiting)
Cytomegalovirus
Assorted coughs and runny noses

We’ve tried everything we know to minimise the risk of contracting disease. We wash hands religiously and change clothes as soon as the kids get home from day care. We try to boost their immune systems with special yoghurts and vitamin supplements. We cross our fingers and touch wood every time one of the kids coughs or feels slightly hot to the touch. But it’s our nightly routine that accentuates for me how strange our existence here is. Every night, we go around the house doing the following:

Refill humidifiers in kids’ bedroom and ours
Plug in electric insect repellents (mosquito bites are annoying, and there’s also dengue fever to consider)
Prepare inhalator for whichever kid has the worst cough, to be given while kid sleeps
Apply insect repellent lotion
Switch on fans
Provide drinking water for bed to soothe dried-out throat of eldest child

At times like this, I feel like the settler on an alien planet, trying to live in conditions that aren’t conducive to human life. And then I find myself wondering how São Paulo looked four hundred and fifty years ago to the Jesuits who came here hoping to escape the immorality and corruption of the coast, when this was all virgin jungle and the summer rains fell on emerald canopies and shining clay and tiny huddled dwellings. I wonder what it was like before the greed and ignorance of the oligarchs who keep making and remaking the city in their own blasted image turned it into such an inhospitable sprawl, unalleviated by the inherent beauty and regenerative properties of the land beneath.

But it rained again today, for a good hour, and the air is sweet and cool now. And so I feel optimistic, fingers crossed and touching wood that we get a run of good health for a while, here in the cidade cinza that is São Paulo.