Life vs Travel: Part I - The Challenges

This is going to be a long one (Warning: Read with ample time!) & don't forget to read Part II.

If you’re travelling, you hardly care about the little things. Travelling is about experiences new moments, enjoying unknown opportunities and stepping outside your comfort zone. Travelling enables you to learn, feel, see, touch, smell, love, appreciate, observe, explore. There are no norms when you’re travelling, and you take things as they come, without a worry in the world. Of course it gets tiring after some time and you start craving the nice hot, heavy-water pressure showers you are used to at home, the routines, the little things you once had. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter because you’re just ‘travelling’ ... But it’s a confusing situation when you move to the other side of the world, trying establish a life, a routine, the ‘norms’ of daily life, and you find yourself neither travelling nor living daily life. Rather, existing somewhere in between. Every day I am experiencing the same opportunities and new moments that I would if I was travelling, yet my experience of them is completely different. When temperate, low water-pressure showers become the prospect of your daily life, not just an experience you leave behind at the end of your travels, it’s much harder to appreciate those new and different moments. In theory, I like to look at the more challenging moments in life as mere stepping stones and character building blocks. However, I am being challenged every day here in Brazil from the smallest examples (like showers), to the much more extreme challenges like poverty, drugs and death. I have to admit that after a month in complete physical, geographical, emotional and psychological limbo (ups and downs), I’ve often felt like I’m near the end of my tether.

On our way back from Sao Paulo, we passed 12 Road Trains (huge trucks) turned over on the side of the road in the mountains and on the highways. There was one truck perched up, almost vertical, in the middle of road on the concrete road divider – it look like something out of an action movie! I have no idea how many people died in each instance, but on a mere single journey, I reiterate, there were TWELVE large vehicle accidents. I have never seen so many accidents as on this one journey in my entire cumulative life. Diogenes and I are really starting to come to an understanding about many topics surrounding drugs, politics, discrimination and the like. Topics like discrimination are very sensitive here in Brazil because there is so much of it, everywhere, on varying scales. Conversely, Brazilians really ‘disapprove’ of it and are completely intolerant to subtle humour or anything related to discrimination. Living in the developed world, I’ve never connected that the drugs used by developed society are fuel for the drug-trade responsible for many deaths and poverty in countries like Brazil. I’ve watched two films ‘Cidade de Deus’ (City of God) and ‘Tropa da Elita’ (Elite Troops) about Favela (Ghetto) life in Rio de Janeiro. Both films are true stories, happening every day in Rio, and I’m struggling to erase the scenes from my mind. Drugs, guns, violence, rape are an everyday reality for tens of millions of Brazilians.

We became lost on our way home from Sao Paulo and nearly ended up in a favela. This was a very scary experience for me. Until then, the favelas were merely clusters of distant suffering to me. My biggest challenge is facing the ‘reality’ that is everyday life in Brazil for most of the population. Generally the locals ‘block out’ the poverty. Many don’t notice it or know any different because they’ve never known any different. However, I’m the type of person who always notices the details, and I believe it’s important to see everything so you don’t become naive or ignorant. The world is not black and white for me, and I like to paint a colourful picture of reality. There are SO many contrasts here from the micro to the macro to the global scale, it’s impossible to ignore them. But to survive here you have to block them out... and I’m just not sure I’m ready to... or if I even want to. If I block out the poverty and all the things that shock me, then I’m just feeding the System, and if everybody here continues to pretend everything is okay, then how will things ever change?

Brazil recently scored higher on the Happiest Countries List than Australia, and so I ask myself regularly - if all the people are happy here, then who I am to tell them to change or to be different or to live a different life? (By the way, I never stand from the perspective of an ‘Australian’, rather a perspective based on my international experience). So often I try to relax and ‘accept’ my new reality and enjoy it for what it is. But poverty, pollution, chaos is everywhere in every corner. It’s not so much the smaller towns that shock me, but the bigger cities like Curitiba and Sao Paulo. It would be easier if we were in a small, less-developed or even rural region because the contrast would be explicit, and hence the differences would be ‘acceptable’. But we’re in a part of Brazil which tries to compare with the developed world, and I struggle to comprehend that the big cities are classified as ‘developed’. Of course the houses are smaller than what I’m used to in Australia (a country which has infinite space per capita), and there is high-density living so many families live in apartments. But people generally live in good conditions by any standard in any country. The contrast comes when you step outside and the road is unsealed or in need of serious repair, the sidewalk pavement is cracked and uneven, the curb is dishevelled, the powerlines above are monstrous, the air is thick with pollution (a pollution the locals don’t even notice) and poverty lurks around the corner. There are just so many contrasts to my idea of ‘developed’, I find it hard to accept that it is so. It’s just all relative. I’m starting to learn that ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ status here in Brazil refers largely to the people, not the infrastructure. It refers to the level of education, relative income, etc, of the people, rather than the living conditions themselves.

Brazil is really unlike any country in the world. It can’t be compared to its latino neighbours because of its population, but it can’t be compared to its populous companions like India, China, USA, Russia because of its culture. In regard to their size and culture, I have to say, they’re doing okay. I used to think having the Church connected to the State was a bad idea because it’s generally known to impede development, but here in Brazil I can see how important it is for the country to maintain such a connection. The Church in Brazil provides a space for community, morals, values and hope to be maintained, and I definitely support that.

Continuously experiencing daily life in a developing country is a great challenge, and I’m still trying to figure out how to experience it with a warm and open heart, embracing it for what it is, whilst maintaining my values and vision of hope for humanity by not neglecting or ‘ignoring’ the problems. Nevertheless, I hear Brazil has come leaps and bounds in the last 20 years and maybe I’m expecting too much from this country. Nevertheless, I’m learning so much every day and my perceptions are changing all the time, and I know I will find the balance soon.