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Saudade.

I don’t know if it’s getting closer to another change, or if it’s because we had a nice sunny day on Monday, but I am really missing Fortaleza a lot right now. I find myself frequently with tears in my eyes, remembering people I hold so close to my heart. Getting emails from people there makes me feel closer, yet also further away as an email only expresses a fragment of the whole picture. We all perceive and express and feel things differently anyway, don’t we.

When Andrew emailed to say that Lisa is close to having her baby and had spoken of me, it made me want to go there and be with her. Be with her in this important and insecure time of her young life. Be with her with encouragement and support. Be with her and show her that she is worth going the extra mile for. It brings back memories of 5 years ago getting up at the crack of dawn to take 15 year-old Rachel to the pre-natal care offered for free on Friday mornings by some Catholic nuns, and getting to go with her to get an ultrasound. Memories of being really angry and frustrated that when she was giving birth for the first time at age 15, she wasn’t allowed anyone with her. Memories of visiting her and seeing her little David only 4 hours old, and memories of James just stood by the hospital bed seeing Rachel and wee David with tears streaming down his face. Tears expressing the heart of a father (even if he wasn’t the biological father).

It is good to feel this saudade (a Portuguese word which means the concept of missing someone or something, for which there is no English equivalent). Good, because it means that I did give of myself, and that I did leave some of myself behind. Not that I ever doubted that I did, but some days I go through the day and feel kind of numb. It seems far too simple to get sucked into the Norwegian way of life. It is so easy to loose focus on what lies beyond what I can see and what the media feeds me. It is so easy to stop feeling. Yet I am grateful that I still feel. Grateful that when I think of Brazil my eyes well up with tears. Grateful that when I see people suffering on TV my heart goes out to them, and I feel a bit of the compassion and justice of God.

So 4 months down the line the saudade remains. I don’t know if it is less or more or different than when I first came back. It’s just there really. It’s hard to imagine myself doing something different, being someone different. I am who I am and what I have lived has marked me for life. And I am grateful. Grateful for having had the opportunity to share my life with the people I met, and grateful for being allowed to share their lives.

I think the saudade is going to stick around for a good while still. Maybe forever. And as I continue this journey I’m on, a journey where the aim isn’t to get to a destination, but the aim is to live, I wait in expectation for what the next stop holds.

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