The Power of Woman

The Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of Recife was elected this past Saturday and, for the first time in its history, the membership is composed of eight women and just one man. It is also a very young assembly, with three members in their 20s and no one older than around 50 or so. This is just one more piece of evidence in support of my privately-held belief that the reason the Universal House of Justice is confined to men may in fact be so that, in the future, there will still be a few men involved in administering the Faith...!

220 Volts and a Cold Shower

This past three-day holiday weekend, Emilia, Jasmin and I got to enjoy the beautiful seaside town of Porto de Galinhas, one-and-a-half hours south of Recife. There you will find pristine beaches, coral reefs, regional arts and crafts, and some great seafood restaurants. Slowly but surely, luxury resorts are beginning to take over the area, but there is still a lot of local charm along the town's main pedestrian street and waterfront. In a few more years, it may be completely over-commercialized, so get there while you can!

Jasmin certainly had the most fun, spending the mornings in the motel pool and the afternoons at the beach. I think she spent more hours in the water than out, and if she could've had her way, she'd have slept at the beach, too. Needless to say, we all looked like overcooked lobsters by the end of the three days. What little time we could get away from the water, we spent enjoying the many shops, restaurants, and cafés all along the beach area, some of them with front entrances right off of the sand. The inflated tourist prices didn't help, but we did even make a few purchases. Another highlight was an impulse trip out to the coral reef pools on a jangada, for which I was singularly unprepared. Emilia and Jasmin were still decked out in beachwear, while I, already planning for the trip home, decided to dress in street clothes. Needless to say, I ended up barefoot on top of a coral reef (didn't want to soak the tennis shoes!) dodging spiny urchins with each footstep, and finally just gave up and dove in clothes and all. Hey, you only live once! The ride back was a bit soggy, though.

Our home-away-from-home for the weekend was a small motel known as Pousada Mangue Mar, about 4 or 5 blocks from the beach, and therefore considerably cheaper than its waterfront competitors. The first evening we noticed a problem with the shower -- the water was cold and the faucet was, well, shocking. An explanation for those of you not familiar with Brazil: hot water heaters are almost non-existent here. Hot showers are taken with the aid of an electric shower head that heats the water as it comes out, obviously requiring a great deal of electric power in order to get the water up to temperature quickly before it flows out of the nozzle. I can only imagine the engineer who came up with this idea thinking: "hmm, a 3000 Watt electric coil plugged into the wall right above a running shower nozzle... sounds like a great idea! What could go wrong?" I soon found out.

Although the shower head appeared to be working at all, grabbing the faucet in a certain way gave a mild electric shock. Clearly, there was power somewhere. In my brilliance, I decided to unscrew the nozzle of the shower to see if I could tell what the problem was. Couldn't see a thing, so I began to screw it back on. At the exact moment the nozzle made contact with the rest of the shower head, a sharp pain shot through my hand, down my arm, and through my feet. If you've never felt 220 Volts run through your body, let me tell you, there's nothing like it... and it ain't pleasant. At this point, realizing that I had possibly escaped death by sheer blind luck, I decided maybe it would be better to mention something to the motel owner about the shower. An hour later, hand still throbbing and tingling as we left for dinner, I noticed that the sign in front of the motel advertised chuveiro elétrico (electric shower) while all the other nearby motels were advertising chuveiro quente (hot shower). I could not fault them at all - they had given exactly what they had advertised!

Jangadas on the beach at Porto de Galinhas

An electric shower

Jasmin