Life Almost Entirely Off the Grid

In 1998, a year after my first mission trip to Brazil, my ministry program at Harding University went to Brazil on an "International Campaign".  One classmate didn't make it to orientation and also had to go to Brazil a couple of days after the group arrived.  We were in downtown Belo Horizonte walking back to the church building after lunch when we met up with him.  He was grinning from ear to ear and looking up at the buildings.  I told him it was good to see him, and he continued grinning and looking around.

"Wow.  I didn't know there'd be all these buildings here.  This is a city!  I thought we were going to be in a village in the jungle somewhere!"

Sigh.

The year before I moved to Brazil and got married I went to a teaching supply store.  I was preparing to teach English in Brazil, so I needed some items to help out.  Looking around I found a series of books for elementary school teachers about different countries around the world.  There was one for Germany, another for the United Kingdom and still others for South Africa, China and Australia.  Sorting through them I found "Brazil."  I took a deep breath and opened the book.  Jungle.  Amazon.  Canoes.  Native American villages.

What comes to the minds of most Americans - if anything - when they hear the word "Brazil" are images of jungles.  They think "Amazon."  This inaccurate association may well be corrected over the coming years as the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio de Janeiro approaches, but I'm not sure.

The trouble is that although I want people to understand that Brazil is much more than jungles, and in fact most of the country is not jungle and the vast majority of the popluation lives in urban areas, we really shouldn't forget that there are jungle areas in Brazil.  They make up part of what is Brazil.

Seth Kugel can generally be counted on for an interesting first-person view of life in Brazil from the perspective of an outsider (non-Brazilian).  He doesn't disappoint with his recent article for GlobalPost, Soccer and soap operas in the Amazon.  In it he shares about a small fishing village where there are a handful of TVs and a generator that sometimes has fuel to power them.  The locals are hooked on soccer games and soap operas, and through these they absorb the larger Brazilian culture that exists thousands of miles away.

Some may consider they way of life idyllic and the TVs an intrusion, but I wonder about their health care and education situation.  The report doesn't tell us.  That wasn't the point.  It seems to me though that there are definitely "benefits" to civilization which, without coercion, these folks would love to embrace.  Television and electric lighting is just a beginning.

You may call me evil, but I'd like these people to have the opportunity to be "on the grid."