An Unanswered Question

I would not trade where I grew up for anything. Two short months after I was born, my parents moved from their childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois to South America – Brazil, to be more precise – to work as missionaries. And so the first 15 years of my life would be lived in simple native villages.

Most of those years were spent in a Xavante¹ (pronounced shah-váhn-tee) community located in the cerrado ecosystem² that occupies large portions of the Brazilian Central Plateau. A savanna-type landscape with scrub trees and dense gallery forests along rivers and streams, it was in near pristine state when our family lived there. I learned from the native peoples about the edible fruits, leaves, roots, and barks (yes, that is correct - as in tree bark), and the water was pure enough to drink directly from the stream beds.

One treasured gift in this upbringing is that I became a part of and learned to navigate the boundaries between three different cultures simultaneously – Xavante, national Brazilian, and my own family's mid-west USA. And I felt equally at home and a part of all three. In my teen years though a fundamental question would be raised that would not find an answer until much later.

Two things led to this question for me – a question I don't ever remember voicing aloud, but simply pondered. First was a changing attitude I began to sense when meeting other guys my age, especially in urban settings. Pretty easily identified as an americano with my blond hair and blue eyes, I experienced that, because of that identity, I was no longer welcome. Verbally and on a few occasions through actual physical threats it was made clear that I was a persona non grata.

This was the mid-sixties and the heyday of the Peace Corps that had been established only a few years earlier by President John Kennedy. I thought – and what I heard from my parents and their colleagues at least – was that this was a wonderful initiative intended to help peoples and nations around the world. But that was not the message I heard from Brazilian teens and college students. They made it clear that they did not like the Peace Corps and that their wish was that the Peace Corps workers would all go back home to the U.S.

And so the question gradually emerged for me. It was clear that it was about the United States. Our nation, and by association we, were not welcome. Our help was not wanted. It would be only some fifteen years later that the answer to this puzzle would come.

1  There will be more on the Xavante People in later posts.

2  There will be more about the cerrado ecosystem in later posts as well.