I grew up in Brazil and my husband Mike learned Portuguese when we got married, but actually Brazil wasn’t where we had expected to go. We thought we'd go to Angola but we had a baby and there was a war going on at that time so the idea was to work in Brazil until the war finished. We’ve been here now more than 20 years!
When people think of north-eastern Brazil they think of the Amazon rainforest but in Trapiá we’re thousands of miles from the rainforest. It’s cactus here - in our first four years it didn’t rain! Trapiá is not a village but a rural community in the poorest part of the whole of the Americas and with my husband being an agriculturalist we actually went there to do rural development.
We found, however, that we couldn’t plant anything because there was no water. So we worked on child mortality, which was extremely high at that time. Half of the babies were dying before they were even a year old and it’s not in the official statistics because they didn’t register the baby’s birth or death. Things are generally better in Brazil now because for the last six years we've had a good president who comes from this area of Brazil and his number one aim was to reduce this kind of poverty and he’s done that.
To help remedy the high infant mortality rate in Trapiá we brought in water filters because a lot of the children were dying of diarrhoea. With so little water around, they just drank it however they could get it. Then Mike started researching what could improve the goats’ diet because as soon as there was drought the goats started dying because there was nothing to feed to them. So we planted a lot of trees that could withstand the drought and that stopped the goats from dying off.
We had been there about eight years when we started to see the people had extremely low self esteem. The people of Trapiá are despised by everyone and they despise themselves. They’ve never owned a piece of land. They are people who have always worked for huge landowners and can be moved any time. They don’t have traditions or structures.
And so we started studying the Bible together with them because we thought if they could see God values them then that give them more self esteem. We didn’t go there to plant a church, although obviously we are Christians and we expected people would become Christians through our work. But they had this strange concept of Christians as not being people who have a relationship with God but rather people who don’t dance, don’t smoke, don’t do anything fun, and then maybe God will reward them when they die! So we felt we didn’t want to ask them to become Christian at that point.
