No words again...

I've just watched the movie "Tropas de Elite"..



its treating the same topics as "Cidade de Deus"



and "Cidade dos Homens"



honestly, I just cannot think about a comment that would be appropriate to say..


here is a documentary about the situation in Brazil and its civil war.

My year in Brazil

What are things that change you?

That build your personality,

that let you grow to the person you are?

And does that process of ever-changing ever stops?

Or is it not that every second of your life,

maybe from the moment you are created,

changes you and makes you to the person you become?

Wouldn’t that mean that we mostly consist of situations and feelings?

Maybe there are some situations that change us more than others, maybe there are things we just realise years after they happened and maybe its not just moments and situations that changes us but also people?

And what about love?

Doesn’t love always changes a person and let her grow?

If our personality is like a puzzle that becomes bigger and bigger the older we get and the more moments we live, wouldn’t it be good to know which parts of that puzzle are the biggest?

Where were the crossroads in our history?

And why we decided to chose a certain direction and not an other one?

One thing in my life that has definitely changed my whole way to see the world and in long terms has changed my whole life so completely was a country; and its people.

This country shook me to the core and even today, as this country lies so far behind me it still makes me cry from time to time.

When I was 15 my current puzzle-piece was called puberty, and all I wanted at that time was to go away, far away from everything that was surrounding me at that time, so I decided it would be just a great idea to go abroad, somewhere far away were the sun was shining and I didn’t understood a single word. Actually I didn’t care about the country but more about the fact to go away.

So in July 2002 I landed in a country called brazil and like most 16year old teenager I was pretty naïve and completely unconcerned about anything.

I landed first in Sao Paolo, together with 75 other German teenagers, all as naïve and unconcerned as I. there were many many other teenager from many many other countries all waiting for the same: the final flight to their final destination, their new home.

I had to wait twelve hours with Fabienne from Swiss and Elvira from Belgium to get our flight to a city called Recife. The only thing I knew about Recife at that point was that it is situated in the north-east of Brazil at the coast;

the word coast was all I wanted to hear so that’s why my further research stopped right there.

Late in the evening we finally landed in Recife and there were quite many people to pick up Elvira and Fabienne, but unfortunately nobody to pick up Laura!

I was standing there for a while with all the others because no one wanted to leave me there alone as I suddenly heard a teeny tiny voice behind me, coming from a teeny tiny woman, my mother!

So we were all pretty happy and after some minutes of chit-chatting I found out that my sister was at a festival and that Fabiennes sister wanted to that same festival too, so we decided to go there, Fabienne, her new sister and me.

We arrived at two in the morning in a house without water or toilet flush were we had to sleep on the floor because the beds are all occupied.

The next days we met my sister and went to that festival but Fabienne and me didn’t really noticed any of what was happening because we were experiencing our first Brazilian food poisoning.

After this first quite adventurous weekend my new family came to pick me up from Fabiennes place, fortunately one of our neighbours owned a taxi and was so kind to help my family pick me up. My little cousin who was 12 years old at that time talked to me the whole way home but as I couldn’t understand a single word I just kept staring out of the window to see what my new world looked like. It was very interesting and very new to me and just as we drove by a neighbourhood that made me think: how can people live under this conditions? The taxi suddenly stopped and there we were, at my new home were I would be able to answer my just asked question by myself.

My new home itself looked pretty cosy and nice from the inside; just the ants in the kitchen, the lizards in the living room, the cockroaches everywhere and the cold water were a bit new and not so convincing. Another thing was the air-condition that beamed our room right into ice age at night and made me sleep with about 10 extra sheets.

But all in all the family was very nice with me, almost all our neighbours were somehow relatives and my first not existing Portuguese developed pretty quickly.

In august 2002 my dear friend Fabienne was assaulted and almost raped! This came as a huge shock for all of us since she lived in a rich district know for its safety.

Fabienne returned immediately to Switzerland and my sister decided it was time to inform me about the dangers of my new city.

My district was surrounded by three slums which were involved in an ever-continuing war, mostly because of drugs and power. Recife was at that time the forth most dangerous city in Brazil with about 70 assassinated people per weekend, again, mostly because of drugs.

The city had also huge problems with slave trade, organ trade, sex tourism, and of course poverty and criminality in general.

There were many other things like that but I won’t mention them, simply because I can’t!

I don’t know if anybody can relate to the feelings and to the fear I felt at that time, I didn’t leave the house for two weeks because I was sure that as soon as I went out something horrible would happen to me.

At that time I talked a lot to my friend Elvira and we made plans on how to protect us.

Specially during these day all I wanted was to go home but I knew that I couldn’t, I never told my mother about my situation at that time to don’t let her feel the fear I felt.

After some time all these things became normal to me, I knew what I could do, how I could go out and how not. I stayed at home a lot, spend the day with the girls in my street and had just a nice time.

In January 2003 Elvira and I participated at a huge trip organized by AFS. We were about 130 exchange students from all over the world travelling four weeks around the whole country and it was just so amazing!!!!

After that my year changed, I changed family, found new friends and new happiness.

Ill continue maybe later in detail because it is just such a long story with so many people, situations and emotions that deserve to be mentioned.

But in some words:

I lived in wealth, I lived in poverty, I lived in happiness, I lived in fear and I lived in danger.

I found love, I found hate, I found violence, I found peace and I found faith.

And I learned. Learned to grow, learned to be strong, learned to be fragile and learned to love.