Friday 22nd June 2018

Friday 22^nd June 2018.

On this day a year ago, Marcos had spent two days in the UK; the first days of almost two months together after 11 months apart.

Today marks two months since my mum’s 60^th birthday, which I returned to the UK as a last-minute surprise for (you should have seen the look on her face).

Today marks two months since Marcos’s dad was admitted to hospital with mild symptoms that could mean almost anything.

Sustainable Secrets and an Unexpected Encounter

One Saturday a few weeks ago, Marcos and I went to the Jardim Secreto (Secret Garden) fair in a hipster Italian area of the centre of São Paulo not far from Compassiva’s office. We went to buy solid shampoo, but it’s safe to say we ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.

Unseasonal Generosity

‘Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox: that the birth of a homeless person should be celebrated in every home’.

I was surprised to come across this Chesterton quote in a shopping centre in the heart of São Paulo, on Paulista Avenue, otherwise known as the financial centre of Brazil. It’s a profound paradox of a street, where the most important financial activities in the country take place inside buildings that seem to touch the sky, whilst outside the ground is lined with homeless people with not a penny to their name. This paradox Chesterton describes goes beyond the epidemic of homelessness, to the global refugee crisis. References to Jesus’ status as a refugee during his childhood on the run from King Herod are common in the Christmas period. However, as we draw towards the end of January (already?!), it’s essential we remember that this is an ongoing reality which remains urgent all year round.

Happily Ever After

I think my apologies for not writing more regularly are getting old now, but as usual the new year offers a good moment to restart. As I wrote in October, last autumn (the British autumn, that is) represented a new season for me as I flew into a Brazilian spring to start my life working with NGOs there. Things, in true real-life style, didn’t go as planned.

Road Trip: BR-116

Thursday, 26^th October 2017. Having spent almost two weeks in the Meninadança office in Belo Horizonte, the time had finally arrived to go up north to visit their projects, the Pink Houses, where the grassroots work with vulnerable girls and their communities takes place.

Autumn to Spring

October. In my opinion, this is the most wonderful time of the year. I prefer crunchy leaves, crisp autumn sunshine and that slightly surreal sense of nostalgia combined with simple contentment, to overcrowded streets reeking of over-consumption, lined with flashing Christmas lights. September in the UK was unusually stormy (global warming becoming an increasingly evident reality) but I have to say that despite missing the British October, I was happy be able to witness the first transformations of autumn, from green into glowing reds and golds, from carefree summer adventures to autumnal nostalgia. I was happy to be able to wear boots and jumpers and scarves, before I left it all for a Brazil going into spring.

Spring is Coming

Recently, I’ve found it very easy to get angry about what I see going on around the world, and increasingly in my own country. At the same time, I’ve been finding it difficult to see how I’m channelling that anger into anything truly productive. I’ve been reading the news, signing the petitions, tweeting far more than usual,

A New Day Dawning

So much for writing a post every couple of weeks… As it’s now 2017 and has been almost five months since I last wrote anything other than an essay (bar a couple of posts for Tearfund Lifestyle), it’s high time I forcibly cured myself of an extreme case of writer’s block.

2016 was a crazy year globally, but it also completely and irrevocably changed my life personally.

The Olympic Stretch

In contrast to what I spoke about in my last blog, some of the work I did towards the end of the trip was more related to raising awareness in the general public than doing grassroots work. A lot of the work we’d been doing had been looking towards the Olympics, so it was great to stay on a bit longer and see how it took shape.