About the Author

Spontaneous Action

By Michael D. Kerlin
This article was printed in Abroad View Fall 2005

Back in 1997, I tried my hand at academia for a while. I had received a Fulbright grant, just after college, to research African immigration to Portugal with a focus on the immigrants’ efforts to support their countries of origin.

The Instituto Superior de Ciéncias de Trabalho e da Empresa, loosely translated as the Lisbon School of Social and Managerial Sciences, would be my home. Several of the university’s classes, libraries, and professors were to be my tools, along with a small sampling of field research.

The academic thing alone didn’t suffice for me though. I also needed to participate in the community that I was studying, and ideally contribute to it. There were roughly 100,000 Africans legally residing in Portugal in the late ’90s, and a few hundred thousand more illegal Africans. They came mostly from Portugal’s former colonies—Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tome and Principe.

In my second week of nine months in Portugal, I found myself on a train out to Amadora, a nondescript working-class neighborhood that was home to some light industry and several African immigrants. At the northern edge of Amadora’s downtown lay the Encosta Nascente, or “Fountainside,” neighborhood. Contrary to its peace-evoking name, Encosta Nascente was a haphazard collection of simple cement homes, reminiscent of shantytown dwellings in far poorer countries.

I wandered past stray dogs, down one of the two dirt footpaths that lead into Encosta Nascente and toward the neighborhood’s community center. The center claimed to offer only after-school tutoring and daycare, but it also served as the neighborhood’s proxy city hall—an oasis of order in the midst of dirt, chaos, and petty crime.

The center’s directors were intrigued by my offer to chip in some volunteer work. My Portuguese was still quite limited, so we settled on physical education. I would be Encosta Nascente’s gym teacher “Teach them something that’s not fútebol,” said the assistant director. “These kids think that sports don’t exist beyond fútebol.”

I followed the assistant director’s advice and introduced the children to volleyball, Frisbee, badminton, track and field, and basketball. Roughly half of the children were second-generation Portuguese, children of African immigrants. Their parents had come chasing construction jobs, some as early as the 1960s, and others during the 1990s, when Portugal needed fresh labor to help it gear up for the 1998 World’s Fair in Lisbon. Part of Portugal’s new minority, the African-descent children in my gym classes would face discrimination and confusion in their teen years. But for now, they were just kids, who played with the white Portuguese and revealed their differences only with an occasional reversion to their parents’ Creole languages. Since the children did not concern themselves much with their parents’ homelands, I often felt that my work at the center at Encosta Nascente lay too far from the core of my research. So I sought out more volunteer work with older, more recent immigrants.

I discovered a Portuguese NGO called OIKOS that operated a Center for African Students. The center provided educational resources and study space for university students who had come north on shoestring scholarships from Portugal’s former colonies. These were Portuguese Africa’s best and brightest, but many of the students worked construction jobs alongside their studies, so they could send money home to their families in Africa.

I offered weekly English classes to the students. Mostly, my classes were indistinguishable from any other English classes that an American might offer in Portugal. But occasionally the differences emerged. During one vocabulary lesson on food, I asked each member of the class to tell me what he or she ate for different meals. When we reached a Guinea-Bissauan student named Pedro it was time for a sentence describing breakfast. Pedro paused awkwardly, then said, “I’m sorry. I do not eat anything for breakfast. I do not have money.”

The students were angry with expensive Portugal, angry with their Portuguese universities that required them to read technical textbooks in English, and angry with the foundations that sponsored them at subsistence levels. But they were also angry with their families back in Africa. Whole families, and extended families, assumed that a scholarship in Portugal was a ticket to riches. The pressures were enormous. “Send me shoes. I only have one pair of shoes. Please send me an extra pair,” a cousin might write. “I need to pay your younger sister’s school fees,” a parent might write.

Some of the most pressured students came from Guinea-Bissau, where well over half the population lived on just a dollar a day. After several conversations with these students, I decided to focus my field research on Guinea-Bissau. I planned to meet with Guinea-Bissauan groups in Portugal and visit their families in the tiny West African nation just south of Senegal.

I traveled to Guinea-Bissau in February, and it was one of my English students from OIKOS who made my trip less daunting. The student, Vital Incopté, had arranged for his family to look after me during my time in the capital city, Bissau. The Incopté family met me at the airport, shared meals with me, and accompanied me on some of my rounds of the city.

Sending a visitor home to his family meant more pressure on Vital though. He had to send money and gifts back with me. Other Guinea-Bissauans that I had met over the course of my volunteer work and field research decided to send money and gifts with me too.

In the end, I transported two children’s backpacks, two shower curtain rods, a deceased immigrant’s suitcase, a letter for a priest, a camera full of film, and $350.

My heavy load at the airport was still light enough to make me an ideal target for more enterprising remittance senders. One immigrant even tried to convince me to check an industrial tire for him with my luggage.

But it was all worth it. Cousins lit up when they saw their backpacks. Sisters glowed at the thought of replacing rotting shower curtain rods. A mourning father held his son’s belongs. A priest smiled at the memory of one of his star students. A mother took pictures with her new camera and sent them back to Portugal with me for her son. And, with some long awaited extra money in hand, several families stocked up on rice and other household goods.

It was this final community service project—a spontaneous action that stemmed from my tight integration with Lisbon’s African immigrants—that best complemented my research. That tight integration came from seeing research as more than just research, and from pushing the boundaries that normally divide a sociologist from his subjects. I had intended simply to analyze immigrants’ contributions to their homelands, but I never imagined that I would facilitate their efforts to build Africa from afar.