I am travelling through Brazil. I am right here in paradise.
Green in every shade: emerald, jade, lime, moss. The forests here don’t just grow; they thrive, climbing skyward with tangled fingers, full of birds that look like they’ve been hand-painted.
I’ve tasted fruits I can barely pronounce, cupuaçu, acerola, jabuticaba, each one bursting with something sharp and sweet, unlike anything from the polished supermarket aisles back home. Every corner stall seems to sell something sun-ripened, dripping, luscious.
But beyond the lushness, another contrast unfolds: the ever-present chasm between wealth and poverty. You don’t just seeit here, you feel it. Towering glass skyscrapers reflect the sun down onto streets where barefoot kids kick plastic bottles. A luxury apartment might share a wall with a crumbling shack patched together with scrap wood and metal.
And yet, amidst all this, something astonishing happens. People here create beauty from what they have. A woman weaving bracelets from dried leaves, her fingers quick and sure. Men carving pockets, bags, and sandals out of old tires and discarded cloth. Even in scarcity, there’s craftsmanship, creativity rooted in necessity, but also in pride.
Brazil doesn’t hide its contradictions. It lays them bare. And somehow, both the sweetness and the sorrow stay with you.
Then there’s São Paulo.
A city that doesn’t end. It stretches, expands, devours. Helicopters circle the skyline, traffic snarls like an angry beast, and the streets pulse with neon signs and billboards. Here, the jungle has been replaced with concrete.
It’s impossible to talk about Brazil today without saying his name: Bolsonaro.
In the favelas, in the cafés, in taxi rides and hushed conversations, he hovers like a shadow.
I kept wondering how a country so profoundly intertwined with nature could repeatedly vote for a man who treats it as disposable. A man who laughs at deforestation, who reduces environmental protections to ink on paper, who speaks for developers, not for trees, rivers, or animals.
But it’s more complex than it seems from afar. In São Paulo, many people see him as their defender: of industry, of wealth, of “order.” The rich are shielded by gates and guards, but even some struggling workers believe his promises of security and jobs. It’s the old trick: make people fear their neighbor more than their rulers.
Meanwhile, the Amazon burns. Entire ecosystems vanish in the time it takes to finish your morning coffee.
It’s strange, this dissonance between a country that is nature, and a government that sells it off, hectare by hectare.