September 17, 2008

Office space

Dear Friends,

I am now in the middle of my last semester of teaching in São Paulo, Brazil. This term I am team-teaching with other professors in three different settings and advising students about their theses. My missionary assignment is to teach at the Methodist University of São Paulo, primarily in the graduate school which prepares Brazilians and other Latin Americans to be seminary professors.

Today, I drive my car from the center of São Paulo, where I live, to the industrial suburb of São Bernardo where the university is. My office is on the third floor of “Kappa Building.” On the way to the third floor I go through or past a crowd of undergraduate students whose tuition money is making it possible for me to have an office, paying off the loan with which the university built Kappa Building. These students are majoring in tourism, advertising, or journalism. There are education and literature majors at another campus of the university. The office is a cubicle about six feet long and four feet wide, with built-in desk and built-in bookcase and three chairs. There is no window, unless you count a piece of glass set into the door. There is an ancient computer that clucks for minutes on end while it boots up, and I am lucky to have a computer. There is a telephone in another office, which I can use if I absolutely have to. Things were different 20 years ago.

Professors did not have offices. Professors at most institutions had access to a professors’ room with table and chairs, except when the professors’ room was being used for a meeting. The graduate program did not have a professors’ room. At most institutions there was a place to sit in the library, but in the graduate library the only place to sit was occupied by the librarians themselves. There was some space that was occupied by research projects financed by money from outside the university. In the hallway there was a row of chairs where students would wait to see somebody. That was it, unless you count a nearby canteen, where we would buy snack food and sit at a table with our advisees. The manager of the canteen was starting to look askance at having his canteen used that way, and I was starting to get nervous about overstaying my welcome there.

One day I needed to have a talk with a young man who was just beginning his master’s thesis under my supervision. I decided to leave the canteen alone and seek other space. I thought we could use a classroom where I had had classes the preceding semester, and the classrooms had never been locked. I asked the young man to come with me, and off we went. It so happened that that group of classrooms had been remodeled, assigned to the mathematics department, and locked up tight. There were other classrooms in other buildings, and the young man and I took a tour looking for one we could use. No success. Everything was locked.

I wasn’t out of ideas yet. We grabbed a couple of chairs from the hallway, set them down in a paved area outdoors, sat down on them, and began our session. Three minutes later, the Buildings and Grounds crew came along. They were driving an ancient green Toyota jeep, and we were in their way to perform some maintenance task, probably to prune some bushes. They politely told us that we were in their way. All right, we moved the chairs to what I thought would be a better place and resumed our advising session. Three minutes later, we were in the way again.

We finished our session in the canteen, which I had tried to avoid. Shortly afterward, the student quit graduate school. He didn’t tell me why he quit, but a normal person in his position would have felt (a) insecure and (b) unimpressed with the graduate school.

I had blown it.

That was the low point. The university still wasn’t sure it wanted our graduate program, but they soon moved us to another building where we would have a little more space. Three of us professors shared an office where two of us could work or one of us could talk with a student. Later, the Brazilian government told them how much space they had to give us, so the university borrowed money and built Kappa Building, where our program is housed today.

Times have changed. If another missionary professor should come here in the future, she or he will not make any pilgrimages from one building to another with an insecure young person. There will be other challenges, in a country where advanced education is still relatively new.

Arch Woodruff

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 276