|
The Lebanese coiffeur Georges Azzar, who has worked for three years at one of Brazil's best known beauty salons, Jacques Janine, has already combed the hair of two Arab princesses, one from Bahrain and one from Saudi Arabia.
Habib, as he is called by his Brazilian clients, arrived in São Paulo in December 2001 to visit some relatives and decided to stay in the city.
Azzar was born in Lebanon, but lived in Paris for 16 years, where he worked in two salons, at Alexandre Zouari and Jacques Dessanges, and made contact with the Arab princesses.
"It was a client of mine who recommended me to a princess of Bahrain. In the first times, the princess travelled to Paris for me to do her hair, then she invited me to live in Bahrain and be her exclusive hairdresser," he said.
Azzar accepted the proposal and went to live in one of the six palaces of the royal family. He prefers not to disclose the names of the families and the princesses.
"I lived for three months in the Arab country. She had a beauty parlour inside the palace, where I dyed, cut and dressed her hair and that of her family," he says.
According to Azzar, the princess was a modern woman, had dark and long hair, but she decided to dye them blond and red. "She would do everything to look prettier for her husband. Beneath her veil existed a very pretty, intelligent and modern woman," he states.
After three months in Bahrain, Azzar decided to go back to Paris. Even so, he continued travelling to the Arab country, to care for the princess' hair. For three years, he would spend three weeks in France and one in Bahrain.
Still in France, Azzar also received an invitation to care for a Saudi princess' hair. In spite of being from Saudi Arabia, the princess lived in a palace in Cairo with her two daughters. "I went to Egypt about four times to do the princess' and her daughters' hair," he said.
According to him, the Arab women like to dress up very much; they buy luxurious and tight dresses, wear make-up and dye their hair. Only the husband, however, and the other women are allowed to see them uncovered.
"In the palace in Bahrain there were parties for the women almost everyday, there they could also stay without the veil," he tells.
In Brazil
Azzar was interested by the profession in his adolescence. "I started working as a hairdresser assistant in a salon in Beirut. When I was 17 years old I went to Paris to do a course and when I arrived I found out they had colleges for coiffeurs and I joined in, it was three years," he states.
As well as Brazil, Lebanon, France and Bahrain, Azzar also lived in Italy. He travelled for the first time to São Paulo in 1990 to visit a brother, who already lived in the city.
"I have relatives around the whole of Brazil. There are more people here than in Beirut," he states. He stayed in Brazil for good on the second time he came to visit his family, in December 2001.
"I liked the country and the Brazilian people. I let go of everything in Paris and decided to move to São Paulo. My Lebanese blood was what made go on this adventure," states Azzar, who did not know one word in Portuguese when he arrived.
"Here in São Paulo all my family worked with trade, nobody had contact with professionals in my area, so I went after it myself," said the coiffeur.
According to him, his entry at the Jacques Janine was on chance. "I took the test as a joke and managed a position at the Morumbi Shopping Mall, where I worked for a month, and then came to the salon on Augusta street," he says.
According to Azzar, his plan is to stay in Brazil and have his own salon in the future.
ANBA - Brazil-Arab News Agency
www.anba.com.br
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.