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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

Popsicle cart brings Brazilian flavor to Bloomington

The kitchen clock strikes midnight, and the schoolteacher is halfway finished making spicy chocolate ice pops.

Linda Lewis pours melted chocolate into a pot of simmering milk, sugar and spices. Usually her husband, Iuri, helps, but he has had less time for popsicles since he was hired as a taxi driver.

Tonight, it’s just her, the rows of empty moulds, the hum of the ice machine and the clink of the metal spoon as she stirs the mixture.

“I’m just eyeing it,” she says, trying to divide the liquid evenly.

Lewis is concocting the batch for Rasta Pops, the Brazilian-inspired popsicle cart her family recently started. Three nights a week, she rents the kitchen space from One World Commissary, which owns Pizza X and Lennie’s.

Pushing up her cheetah-print glasses, the 47-year-old mom peers closely at the recipe she created.

It’s been a long day. After working at Harmony School, she pushed her cart to Bryan Park to sell as the sun set, then came here to whip up more popsicles.

“I taste-test them all,” she says. “I feel like I’m very ?particular.”

In one short month, Lewis has found herself in a world of itinerant merchant licenses, minus 20-degree freezers and dreams of $12,000 Finamac Turbo 8 popsicle machines.

“We were just looking for another source of income for our family,” Lewis said. “We thought it would be a nice way for Iuri to work for ?himself.”

***

Lewis and Iuri Santos met in Salvador, Brazil, when she took a yearlong sabbatical to teach English.

Watching bloques roll down the street during Carnival of 1998, her friends joked about which men they found attractive. Lewis pointed to the handsome martial art instructor atop the capoeira f loat.

“Just leave that one alone up there,” she said.

Three months later, the couple was married and ?moving from Brazil to Indiana. It was Santos’ first time in the United States.

“She was the one who came after me,” Santos said. “That’s what made me want to stay with her.”

Santos is a self-proclaimed Rastafarian. He doesn’t cut his waist-long dreadlocks and rejects ideas of materialism.

In Bloomington he teaches capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that combines elements of dance, acrobatics and music.

It’s an identity that encourages the same question, whether he is driving his taxi or pushing the popsicle cart: “How much weed, man?”

“Rasta Pops don’t get you high,” Santos said, laughing. “I wish they could.”

The couple was inspired to open the cart by the popsicle vendors who crowd the streets of Brazil.

“In Brazil in every park, and then on the sidewalks in town, everywhere, people are selling popsicles,” Lewis said. “It’s kind of a favorite memory for my kids when we go to Brazil because you’ll be in the house and hear the guy outside, ’Picolé, picolé,’ and then the kids go running to their parents for money. It’s just like the ice cream man here.”

Lewis was the one who began researching Brazilian recipes, gourmet popsicles and natural ingredients.

About $8,000 later, the family owns its own freezer cart, moulds, umbrella and Rasta Pop signs.

They make mango and mint watermelon. Dolce delte com coco and basil lime.

“We have lots of flavors but none with weed,” Lewis said.

***

Since the cart opened this summer, a pregnant Brazilian woman in town began craving Rasta Pops regularly.

Dogs recognize the doggie pops with Milkbone handles and beg with wagging tails.

“It’s the Rasta takeover,” Santos says as he paces near the popsicle cart on the sidewalk in front of the Monroe County Public Library. The street has been stained by rain, but the sun is making an appearance, and a line is beginning to form.

“Do these have weed in them?” a passing student asks, the fifth to pose the question that hour.

“I wish I could, brother,” Santos replies and then turns to a group walking down the street. “Come on beautiful family, eat some popsicles from the Rasta.”

Lewis was up until 1:30 a.m. the night before cleaning the kitchen while Santos finished his taxi route. Sometimes he drives a 99-year-old woman to visit her daughter. Other nights he takes home drunk college students ?asking him to sell them weed.

Santos calls to potential customers, sashaying up and down while Lewis mans the cart. She clucks her tongue when the Rasta Pop sign comes disconnected from the umbrella.

“I see there’s a benefit in every job in life,” Santos says, watching his wife pull out frozen money from the cart to make change. Their 10-year-old daughter, Zara, and 13-year-old son, Zeca, run by.

“I left a lot in Brazil,” Santos says. “For my children, you have got to live a different life. Here I find ways to bring it with me. Without these things, it would be a lot harder to be here. That’s what keeps me alive.”

A red pick-up truck rolls by, almost shaking the little cart with its bass music.

“Rasta Pops,” the driver says, mimicking Santos’ Brazilian accent.

***

Lewis and Santos weren’t able to break even this season as they hoped. But it doesn’t matter, she said.

“We got a great, overwhelming response from the public,” Lewis said. “We’re going to spend the winter preparing and planning for next season.”

On Saturday, for the last time this year, they will roll the cart to Harmony School to sell at its annual extravaganza. It’s the same place Lewis sold her first Rasta Pop.

“We started the cart for practical reasons, a way to earn extra money,” Lewis said. “Along the way I’ve learned I enjoy creating new flavors and I really enjoy selling the popsicles. ”

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