On the Journey (Brazil)

I have hesitated to write a blog about this, being that it is so personal and that I don’t want it to typecast me into a certain person. I have never been one for alternative healing and all the hippie stuff Boulder is so known for, but at the same time, I have always believed that I need to follow my heart where it takes me and to keep an open mind. I have never been religious and that has not changed. But I do believe there are forces beyond what we know, be it our brains, be it the universe, the unknown, whatever. I think that life has a way of pulling us in strange directions, and when it is somewhere I wouldn’t ordinarily go, all the more reason to pay attention and go.

Anyone who knows me knows that I suffer from chronic neck pain. It is persistent and debilitating and affects every area of my life. Western medicine has done nothing for me. It has been a long, painful and frustrating process.

I was first told about John of God just days after this whole journey began in Zimbabwe. I thought that was quite a coincidence and filed it away in my brain since I was going to South America in a year or so. I don’t really remember where the plan actually took shape, it just did. And soon, I knew that I would go see John of God, I have nothing to lose. He is a healer in a rural city, Abadiania, in Brazil.

Once I made the decision, more and more things seemed to point me in that direction. My boyfriend’s (yes, I cannot believe I just used that word in a blog. Apparently even commitment-phobics can change, believe me I sweated over putting that word in but whew, there it goes. And that is another story in itself of things leading in one direction and almost feeling inevitable) best friend and her husband had been to see John of God. From there all these coincidences brought me to meet more people who had seen him. My mom was on the phone with someone who by chance had someone over for dinner who had spent months in Brazil with him, and so on and so on.

I got my visa for Brazil in Iguazu Falls, Argentina. I was nervous about getting to Brasilia, my jumping off point for the city of Abadiania, but everything fell into place in ways that I never could have imagined. I seem to continue to find that and I have no idea why I worry at all anymore. It felt like I was supposed to come, so it worked out. Hopefully the first of many miracles here.

Crossing the border into Brazil was easy and instead of having to take a variety of buses to get to the main bus station a ride worked out really well. I always stress about money and ATMs, it is a nightmare to be stranded in a country with none of their money and no ATM around and believe me I know this from experience. I was told ATMs are hard to come by in Brasilia, my destination. Luckily not only did the bus station have an ATM but my card worked in it, crisis: averted.

The bus turned out to be comfortable which was good because 26 hours turned into almost 30. I was nervous for Brazil not speaking the language and hearing an assortment of horror stories of robberies and muggings. I was due to arrive in Brasilia at 2 a.m., which not only is scary because it is huge but it is expensive and hard to navigate, but I figured I would cross that bridge when I came to it.

Sitting next to me on the bus was a guy that looked like one that I would suspect could rob me. He was all gangsta’d out, tattoos, tough looking. He turned out to be great and gave me his jacket to sleep on, brought me water, and became a new friend.

And we only really got to be friends thanks to contraband. And he was only on the bus because he had lost his passport in an ecstacy binge at Carnival, and this is important for later in the story because he is possibly going to have saved my life or at least saved me from breaking my legs.

So the beginning stretch of road on my trip I had been warned about a couple times. Apparently it is a route for smugglers and bandits and is best avoided (sorry Mom). So I wasn’t all that surprised when we got pulled over by men in black. But looking closer I saw that though they were wearing bullet-proof vests, they had no guns, just trucks with white plastic bags and clipboards.

It turns out that they were the feds. They began to take out all our luggage from under the bus and search it. I watched them dump items into the white bags. I was frustrated to not understand what was being said by all my fellow bus mates in Portuguese. One word that is universal though that my seatmate said to me was, “contraband.” Then I understood.

We were stopped for a long time and through the help of a guy from Paraguay who spoke both Spanish and Portuguese, my seatmate and I were able to communicate more and I began to understand that most of our bus were smugglers and they had all this illegal stuff from Ciudad Del Este on them. The feds came on board to search through all our stuff and the guy behind me began furiously trying to stuff laptops and DVDs into my arm rest and under my chair which I tried to inconspicuously shove back at him so I didn’t get busted for them.

I knew there was big trouble when I saw outside the window one of the feds find these huge bricks of white powder wrapped in fleece blankets inside a bag. Nothing like contraband and drugs to bring a bus together.

Eventually we set off again with about 2/3 of our bus passengers missing. Somewhere during the night we lost our translator friend but my new friend and I continued to communicate. The thing with Portuguese is, they can mostly understand Spanish (or are REALLY good at faking it) but it is harder for Spanish speakers and especially a sucky Spanish speaker like me, to understand them. So I was only understanding about 10% of the conversation and either doing a good job faking it and not faking it in too offensive of a way, or he just thought I was slow.
But I learned that he was a DJ, has spun all over the world, and got invited to some incredible sounding raves, including one at Machu Piccu in a few months. So that was a good connection.

He managed to get me a ride from a nearby city instead of me going all the way into Brasilia so I could get to Abadiania 2 days early and with much less hassle and not to have to worry about navigating Brasilia at night (though he would have helped me there too, see no reason to worry ever!). We were at a rest stop while he was on the phone arranging this and I was standing in the parking lot when this car comes speeding towards me. I’m an idiot and I froze, it was coming so fast. My new friend jumped down and shoved me out of the way and the car rammed into a wooden post just in front of me which didn’t stop it, but slowed it down before it ran into a wall. Less than a second later, a kid gets out of the car and tears off, the driver in close pursuit but has to give up. I am still not completely sure what happened since my Portuguese lacks but it all caused this huge scene and someone told me it was a robbery and the guy had a gun. Welcome to Brazil, right.

Finally I got to this ride that deposited me right in front of Abadiania, and I was able to find a posada (hotel) right away, no problem, owned by a woman who used to live in Wollongong, the city I studied abroad in in Australia. So it couldn’t have worked out better.

Now I am here and feeling good about things and I am ready for a miracle.