Dinner With Auguste
Part of the trip -
Brazil
An unexpected foray into a dangerous neighbourhood in a Brazilian city results in a very special meal
I was with 4 teenage girls in Belém, northern Brazil, one summer night in 2010. We had performed a show as part of a youth festival and afterwards a driver took us to new accommodation at a school in the city centre. Unfortunately it was the wrong place. We hadn’t eaten for hours and I felt responsible for the girls who had come to Brazil to help me with some research and I was supposed to look after them!
I asked the guard where the nearest pizza place was and he said it was not safe to go out as the neighbourhood was dangerous. To prove his point he had a gun. I asked if he would go for me and he refused saying he had to guard the school. There was a group of men sitting outside on the street and they were
watching my increasingly agitated conversations with the guard and the bus
driver. Then one man got up and walked into a house opposite and came out a few minutes later. He walked over to the school and began talking to the driver.
“He wants you to go with him,” said the driver. I was worried. “But why? It is not safe,” I said. I had learned the script! “To eat with his family,” said the driver. “You must go. Take the girls and I will find out where the other school is and when you are finished I will take you where you are supposed to be.”
So I rescued the girls from inside the school and we followed this stranger across the road and up the steps into his house where we discovered his wife and daughter sitting at a table full of food ready for us to eat; meat, rice and beans, plates of tropical fruit and jugs of freshly made juice. And as we ate we talked in broken Portuguese and the man, who was called Auguste, talked to us in broken English.
It was the best food we ever tasted and the friendliest company we kept
during our 2 month stay in Brazil. We felt honoured, humbled and overwhelmed by the kindness of this man and his family who welcomed us into their home.
When we finished eating it was long past midnight an
d the driver, now
impatient, took us to the place where we were really supposed to be. We said goodbye to Auguste and promised to return but we had no idea where we were and never saw the driver again either. Sitting in that humble kitchen in a poor neighbourhood inone of the most violent countries of the world we experienced the kindness of strangers who saw how they could help fulfil a simple human need. But it wasn’t the food that mattered it was the conversations that we had around the table, trying to share something of our respective lives as we bridged a gap across the world between north and south, rich and poor, visitor and local.
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