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Reflections on whether I'll ever completely leave Brazil.

The sky is grey, and even if it is possible to sit outside and have a cup of tea (I just had a cup of tea outside), I wouldn’t claim that we have tropical heat (not today anyway). Time passes, slowly and quickly, and I kind of feel like I’m just going with the flow really. Life goes up and down. I miss Fortaleza, and get very excited when I receive email updates from those I left behind.

Sometimes I get a bit muddled up because the whole thing of me coming home just doesn’t seem to make sense. I think of Maria who is one of the street girls, now street woman, that I worked with for so long. If someone had time to just totally invest in her life and really show her Jesus, she might get out of the deep, deep, rut she’s in…and Rachel, oh Rachel, who’s had so many ups and downs. She was down last time I saw her, just before leaving. One of my friends in Fortaleza wrote to me last week with good news saying that she’s going with another project to Rio de Janeiro to represent those who live on the streets. Her youngest son who is still just a baby is in a project now (at least his mother’s choices aren’t affecting him as much now). Both these facts are good news, and hopefully signs of things moving in the right direction. To add to that James is going home to stay there while Rachel goes travelling. I feel heavy-hearted thinking about this family I have invested so much in. I pray, and I know that it was right for me to leave, and that I really do need time to process and rest, but life just isn’t fair. Why should I be so privileged as to be able to come home here to Norway, be able to live in a good house, eat what I want and not go hungry, and be able to take time deciding what I feel God is calling me to do with my life. For them life is about survival, for me life is about living.

It’s tricky to know how to do the living bit. Even if my uncertainties and problems are nothing in the big, worldwide, scale of things, they still affect me. It’s been hard to figure out who I am now that I am no longer “Elisabeth-who-works-in-Brazil”; and hard to know what to say when people ask me what I’m doing and what I intend to do in the future. I don’t want to become one of those people, who live in the past, constantly dropping into conversation phrases like: “well, in Brazil….” or “when I was in Brazil…”. Still, Brazil is a huge part of who I am, and it has been a part of making me who I am; and not just the sun-loving bit (I loved the sun before going), but it’s been a part of forming my values and principles. It’s also shown me part of God’s heart, which you can only really truly experience by putting yourself in a position where you are faced with people in extreme desperation and feel it on your skin. I’ve left a part of me in Fortaleza, but I think I’ve also taken part of Fortaleza with me.

I continue in the process of leaving Brazil, I wonder if I’ll ever completely leave?

I was chatting to one of the funeral agents (I work part-time at the funeral chapels) the other day, and it came up that I’d been in Brazil for a number of years. He’d been a missionary in Bangladesh I think. Anyway, his comment then was “I can’t tell that you’ve been in Brazil by looking at you”. I got a bit puzzled by the comment, and kind of wondered how he would have been able to see it. Let’s be honest, even if I had been wearing a bright Brazil t-shirt it wouldn’t have meant anything, lots of people have Brazil t-shirts, especially since the World Cup last year. I asked him what he meant, and he explained that when you’re abroad everyone sees that you’re not from their country and so it’s obvious that you will not be totally like them. Here in Norway no one can tell by looking at you that you have been abroad, and have been changed by that. You might be changed and different and impacted by the time in a different culture, but people don’t expect you to be because they can’t tell by looking at you. That was a very good point, and it also helped me to not be so hard on myself and expect myself to come back and know how to be a “normal” Norwegian, because I’m not.

And so the journey continues…although I’m not quite sure of where I’m journeying to, or if there is a final destination (obviously heaven, but before then)...


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