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| Joni Hoppen dos Santo’s conversation on the road: ‘A friend once told me, “You know, the problem with hitchhiking is that you never know where you’ll end up.” Dos Santos responded: ‘So, it’s a lot like life’.’’ |
Setting out to improve his language skills and seize the summer months in an `European context' and having spent two years in the Netherlands, Dos Santos's carefree spirit sent him on a hitchhiking journey, starting in Enschede to reach Rome, where the soaring temperatures left him feeling delirious yet afforded him the chance to visit the monument of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a revolutionary figure in Brazilian and Italian history.
In Rome, the Vatican City impressed him. `The statues on the top of the walls are twice as big as the ones on the bottom, and the pillars are bigger than a car,' says Dos Santos who would sometimes duck into internet cafés, sending messages to members on the Hospitality Club website to secure lodging for the night.
The hitchhiker's club is supported by volunteers who believe in one idea, namely to bring travelers in touch with people in the places they visit and also give `locals' a chance to meet people from other cultures to increase intercultural understanding. Members can view each other's profiles, send messages and post comments about their experiences.
His own personal strategies and tips to hitchhike are insightful, revealing nuisances of human nature. `I usually never stand by the busy on-ramps to the highways. That is far too risky. I always hitch rides at petrol stations. Most people who speak many languages are not dangerous. The more luxurious the car, the less the chance of getting a ride. If you speak many languages, it also helps.'
Dos Santos has shared his musical talents as a fervent pianist and Spanish guitarist on the road, in restaurants, churches and cafés, sometimes earning him tips, and at other times, accommodations and friendships, where he shared his own cultural experience.
While volunteering at the 14th edition of the Hors Tribu Music Festival in Môtiers, Switzerland, each day he built massive circus-like tents, moved heavy pallets and spent long evenings in French conversations by the warm glow of nightly bonfires. Recalling the dreamlike night life in the mountains of Switzerland with his fellow volunteers after a day of hard labor, he mostly remembers the night sky, `There were more falling stars than wishes.' Historically, a peaceful country with four official languages, Switzerland charmed Dos Santo, making him appreciate the `enormous cultural exchange' and `homogeneous mind set' firmly rooted in this area and its people. In his native country, the official Portuguese language dominates with, according to him, only around five percent of graduates ending up speaking some English and only one percent of these graduates are able to speak English fluently, making Dos Santo an exception to the norm.
He was born in Fraiburgo, Brazil, a city whose geographical features he likens to one of his stops on his recent expedition to Bolzano, Southern Tyrol. `Everything is translated into Italian and German, and people can switch quickly from one language to another. Since languages will always fight to survive like genes, it was interesting to see how Italian German co-exist.'
His own family emphasized above all values, the necessity of a solid education, and was echoed in his mother's mantra, `Education is the only thing no one can take away from you.' Her words paved his path to gain knowledge, in the classroom or through cultural experiences. The backdrop of his youth was a Brazil in the late 90s plagued with an economic collapse, a skyrocketing inflation rate of 30 percent and a dwindling middle class. His family was stripped of their house, automobile, material possessions and every so often, left with no food on the table to eat. That was the moment when he began to reap the benefits of close friends and family who were instrumental to support his educational goals while he held a full-time job and a full course schedule for almost ten years.
Essentially, a philosopher at heart, his growing dismay of the trend to think only of one's needs has left Dos Santo shying away from the concept to work purely for the attainment of material possessions, a modern value embedded in today's `me' society, as he calls it. Modern technologies can cause social separation, he says, open up any English-version computer program to notice the heavy use of the personal pronoun `My.' He offers examples, `It's all: My attachments. My documents. My photographs. My friends. It's a grave error to believe in self-sufficiency, to reduce yourself and all your talents and capabilities for the sake of money. Likewise, it's wrong to categorize complex human beings to only winners or losers or to work on the level of sum-zero environments (game theory), where you only win if someone else loses.' Strongly he advocates reading at least two books each year, apart from required reading material, and taking the time to know your neighbors. He deems `shared values' in any society a bonding factor, resulting in uniting people and garnering altruism. Differening `shared values 'foster division, segregation, marginalization and discrimination, ending in physically visible expressions, such as, walls and visa requirements.
`You'll never know how you can mutually help one another,' says Dos Santos. Being a business major, he recanted the moral lessons that can be extracted from the author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novella The Little Prince, arguing that one cannot own the stars, because one cannot maintain them.
