Last hours on my country

Right now, as I’m writing this, I have about 6 bags full of (mostly) clothes, a file with different documents, a bunch of fears, and a lot of hope. Tomorrow, if everything goes well, is my last day living in Brazil.

It was a strange adventure, first by making a simple trip (well, as far as “jump on a motorcycle with my wife and travel though the country and beyond, and end up traveling 6,449km” is considered simple), then by staying a whole month on an Airbnb and trying everything, from local meetups to social projects to local culture, restaurants, food, etc, and then finally getting all the documentation to live on the country we chose: Uruguay.

We decided to move t Montevideo in March, but then we discovered that my wife was pregnant – so we decided to stay a little bit more in Brazil, to have our baby here and be close to family and the grandparents. Then, the whole pandemic situation came and changed the game a lot, because now what we planned (have our family support and allow then to visit our daughter) could not be done anymore. But, we thought (in the beginning) that we made the right choice even then: because we would otherwise move to Uruguay and suffer the problems of social isolation on a different country.

But then, Brazil showed itself as probably the worst country to handle covid: and I already wrote about it in another post. From the time I wrote it, things became worse (like a lot!): two health ministers left the position, no one came to replace them, and the people became more and more skeptic about the whole covid situation.

Brazil does not have protests against masks, so someone from outside the country probably is not aware of what’s happening here; people are not protesting – they just don’t use it and that’s that. There are laws that you have to use masks when you enter some places like supermarkets and other commercial places, but besides that, almost half the people walking on the streets (and almost everyone exercising) is not using masks at all, or using it incorrectly (not covering the nose, the mouth, or both).

We became more and more scared about going out of our home, so it’s no surprise that we are quite happy to leave here, in the middle of this whole pandemic, because I can’t see how Brasil will handle the situation in the nearest future (and also I don’t want to stay and see what will happen). It’s dangerous here. It’s really, really dangerous, specially considering that there’s no “single source of truth”: some newspapers tell that the number of cases is slowing down, other that’s growing, and depending on the state you’ll have a different number too.

In this whole bizarre situation that the world is living, we’re almost sure that we’ll be able to enter Uruguay – we have all documentation, our tests came back negative, our daughter have a special authorization, and so on. But considering that the whole world seems mad now, nothing is written in stone. I can only hope, and wish that Brazil will grow up on time.

In the meantime, my daughter will also grow, but on a whole new culture – it seems, and I really hope, a better one.