Another interesting curiosity, is the way in which cities in South America compare to cities found in the American west. Brazilian cities grow differently, the best part of town often being downtown — in the city center. People move in and streets grow like roots from a living organism. Any Brazilian city is much more alive than my own — with noise, and traffic and people — people always, always everywhere — coming and going, or just talking to each other. Neighborhoods, especially now in the new dynamic Brazil — with its intelligent fiber-optic freeways - can be confused by their favelas (slums) as they often grow from the same construction materials. Housing is much more organic, where rooms are added as the need arises, or when enough money is collected to complete the next stage of the project. The cities in my part of the world are characterized by sterile zoning and empty inner cities. Our "favelas" are in the center with the rich suburbs connected to them by walled-in freeways shielding commuters from any unpleasant sights and sounds. Not so in Brazil, where there is little need to be ashamed about the contrast between rich and poor, where far more people intend to do something about the suffering they see.

It seems to me that over time as a Brazilian community naturally grows; the houses evolve much like the people that live in them do. Brick by brick they become unique and particular to the inhabitants, and grow organically, definitely not a prefab box, designed to look all the same. This of course is changing as the economy continues to grow with cities like Campinas beginning to behave much like Sacramento — shopping malls sprouting in suburbs complete with hectares of asphalt surrounding them.

Years ago, while in Santa Maria, RS I was asked to visit a favela and speak to a group of teachers. I asked the kids there about how they came to be in their neighborhood. I was treated to a drawing that I still cherish. Together the kids told me how they came to be there, how their parents found old wood, and pieces of plastic. And how the home was becoming a "real" house. With a tree in the front yard. This is a sign, that ethnomathematics is a foot. For me it often calls to me, it lurks, it peeks out of corners and waits to be discovered by those that need it most. I was asked to talk to the teachers about the potentialities of the math in their community. The math of futebol, "bola de gude" and home construction the children had shown me that day.

So it was that that week, my partner and I drove his Uno Mille (a better name for a car for ethnomathematicans could not exist) about 400 km to Varginha and back with a side trip to small little hill towns — known for the coffee, crystals, mysticism and healing waters — all of which receive about 5 minutes worth of reading in my tour books. We traveled on the new freeways that did not yet appear on maps, and were open without much signage. We were forced to use our "super ethnomath" powers to resolve our dilemma… in other words we were forced to ask for help. In the Varginha, we worked with teachers who had been introduced earlier to mathematical modeling by Pompeu and Bassanezi. The energy and interest in learning about mathematical modeling was impressive. Later we worked with teachers in the Vila Industrial in São Paulo, and spoke to Maria do Carmo Mendonça’s students at Universidade de São Paulo.

Six hours north by plane in Natal and a couple of hour’s drive across the brilliant winter green sertão of Rio Grande do Norte, brought me to the town of Baixinha Franca. What I saw there was the true potential of ethnomathematics. I was invited by XYZ to see his research, which has been making trips to this place where a group of teachers and community members met with us under a fruit tree to talk about mathematics. An opportunity to see a group of people coming together — wearing their best clothes, to meet with us, to share with us, to tell us about their dreams. They took us around their town, showed us how they lived. I asked about how they collected water (off the roofs of their houses), and we were shown vegetable gardens and the unique mud and stick construction of their houses.

Now, where I come from people do not talk about mathematics. They do not put on their best clothes, take the afternoon off from what they are doing, and sit with a nosey foreigner and three graduate students under a tree and speak about the potential of their community, learn statistics, and apply it to local fruit production. In my part of the world, mathematics is something rarely spoken about in polite company, let alone in the presence of strangers.

In Brazil is far too easy to focus on "favelas, fome and futebol" as it were. As all of these are ever present and easy to see. But what you need to see is the friendships between people, or how a favela transformed itself into a neighborhood. How houses grow organically, like friendships, from sticks and paper to houses of brick and concrete and eventually sprout parabolic antennae.

What has affected me the most in South America is the hunger. The hunger to know, to ask the urgent question, the deep interest in what the outside world is doing, and where you are from. Where everyone knows much more about my country than we do about theirs. It is contrasted with my students, who have so much, yet seem to know so very little. Brazil leaves me with a great sense of hope for the future. When I look at my students here who by and large are in a hurry just to get out of school, and who rarely stop to observe the beauty around them, I realize that it is my moon that is upside down.