Pride in being Brazilian

In 1998 we were hired to design the water distribution system for the neighborhood of Palanca, in Luanda. Palanca was a true city-slum, with 3,000 ha and a population then on the order of 500,000 inhabitants, almost all recently settled there, coming from the countryside and displaced by the then civil war;

At the time, a younger colleague was supposed to go but, at the last minute, refused to go to a place technically at war. I had to go. Accompanying me as client was the experienced Eng. Ivanildo Calheiros, an excellent colleague. We went on the Sunday TAAG flight (Angolan Air Transport), which still exists and at the time was the only Brazil- Angola flight (now, to Rio, there are about three per week).

We landed in Luanda at night, from an unbelievable Boeing 747 almost full (that one, the largest in the world until today, called Jumbo, with a second floor for first class), at an unbelievable airport completely in the dark, marked out by six or eight cars with their headlights on, and the airplane stopped in the middle of the runway.

Movie stuff...

We got down by stairs placed against the airplane, with the help of the cars’ headlights illuminating, and were rescued from there by a car from CNO (Construtora Norberto Odebrecht), with whom our client had organized the support infrastructure, although the service had nothing to do with CNO. At that moment I understood why I had been advised to travel only with hand luggage...

We left the airport in total darkness and followed a cinematic route, with everything dark, no headlights, passing through barriers of armed soldiers, until reaching where we would spend the night, a place called Vila do Gameck, which was a kind of small residential town for the personnel from CNO’s works.

They assigned Ivanildo and me a guest house with 4 bedrooms, but only the two of us would stay there. There was a small refrigerator with a minimum of supplies and we were told to be ready for breakfast at 6:30 a.m., because that would be our “shift”. There were no external lights and the windowpanes were covered on the inside with brown paper.

I remembered my military service.

In a quick inspection, I remember having found a book left by the previous visitor: “Minha Vida de Playboy” by Jorginho Guinle. Who could that previous visitor have been, so connected to our culture?

At 6:30 a.m., through a mixture of obligation, tension, hunger, curiosity, etc., we were already in the large worksite dining hall together with other colleagues, most of them CNO engineers.

Little by little we learned that CNO carried out several operations in Angola and that there it was as if it were a fenced-off neighborhood, where everyone lived. That, because of the state of war, many works were deactivated or slow, which was why many houses in Vila do Gameck were unoccupied but, as it was the only place with a minimum of infrastructure and security, the empty houses were rented by members of the diplomatic corps of several countries. I remember people from France, Italy, the United States, Russia, but there were many more.

As Gamek was a true neighborhood, CNO personnel and their families lived there and there was a supermarket and a primary school with Brazilian teachers for the employees’ children.

So, while we were having breakfast in that dining hall, we saw the children line up in some 4 or 5 groups of 20 to 30 students each and, at 6:55 a.m., begin to sing the Brazilian national anthem while the Brazilian flag was raised.

At that moment we all stood up and, in a position of respect, also sang softly so as not to disturb (not compete with) the children outside. And all the foreigners, also standing, at attention, respectfully following that demonstration of organization, competence and daring.

I was moved to tears during all the five mornings I stayed there.

More than 15 years later, I tell this still with emotion, because I never felt so proud to be Brazilian and to be a Brazilian engineer. I owe this one to CNO.

Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer, chronicler and columnist, member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the Institute of Engineering # 2,333 characters.