Our eleventh man

Around here, we’re quite used to foreigners moving in and out. Globe trotters, tourists immigrants, refugees from all sorts of places, with all diversity, they have a lot in common, they all have to face barriers and frontiers that go from subtle to very strong and even astonishing, just for being expats. I distinctly remember this African guy that I met in the 1980`s. He was one of the Higher Education Exchange Program students at UnB. Even though he spoke Portuguese, like all of us, he did it in a very peculiar way, a mix of the Portugal pronunciation with the creole intonation, which resulted on something difficult to understand sometimes. We became friends easily, though, for from the beginning, he never missed any of our political students’ meetings, where he really fitted in. The students from the Exchange Program were all male, which made it a little bit harder for us, girls of the pedagogy course, to socialize. Usually, the gender barrier is as strong as the ethnic one, despite modern premises, so, most girls had an ambiguous attitude towards my friend. They wanted to integrate, but maybe just didn’t know how to do it properly. They wanted him to feel accepted but instead they made him feel like an outsider. And besides, he was extra shy. Some were just nasty and started laughing at his way of talking. They mocked his shyness too. Worse than taking the mick out of him, I believe, was that some people would just leave him talking alone, all by himself, in the middle of a sentence - I recall two or three people doing it - simply because there was a general idea that he was not understandable at all. Well, if on one hand my friend had problems making friends among the girls, on the other hand it was no big deal being accepted among the boys. In a couple of days the only barrier he had to face was one of that protects the other team’s goal. Apparently, in the male field it doesn’t matter in what language you’re yelling, as long as one can keep the ball on one’s feet moving and away from the adversary. My friend did more than that. As he happened to be one the greatest football players back there in his country. He even had taken part in international competitions in communist countries. Once he told us that in one of his trips to compete in Russia, people would surround him in the streets asking the funniest questions about his color and they would ask rub his skin to check if any black ink might come out. Meanwhile, he thought to himself how come people were so white, almost transparent, so one could see their tiny little red and blue veins! Immediately after telling us this story in class, he became our eleventh man! Our hero, our savior, the one that would honor our house forever, the living memory of our dear “faculdade de educação”! At that time, our male teams always needed to borrow male players from other courses. If my memory serves me well, it was because some of our boys would rather play in the girls’ teams – much more fun! At a certain limit, boys were allowed in female teams, while girls were 100% prohibited in male teams. For once in a lifetime, we had a complete male soccer team. And it was not only that, we also won our one and only glorious CUP in history, for first place in a soccer competition. After that, my African-hero-friend had no problems to grab girls’ attention for a while. Which makes me wonder, why, after all, women don’t usually like football, eh? To Matheus Last week we were jogging our memories before talking about how easy or how difficult it is to live abroad. Someone mentioned that the bullying foreign students suffer in Brazilian schools is very similar to the one Brazilian students get when they`re studying abroad. The activity in class made me open the doors of memory and immediately start walking down memory lane. I picked up one story that came back to me to share with you. I always knew, for some reason, I`d have this story written before I reach eternity.